Guestsplaining: Thomas Griffin on St. Francis of Assisi | Fr. Patrick Briscoe & Fr. Gregory Pine

January 27, 2025

Fr. Patrick: This is Father Patrick Briscoe.

Fr. Gregory: And this is Father Gregory Pine.

Fr. Patrick: Welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all who support us. If you enjoy our podcast, please consider making a monthly donation to us on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever we listen to our – wherever you listen to your podcasts. Wow, I almost got through that Fr. Gregory.

Fr. Patrick: Nailed it. 

Fr. Patrick: That’s so fun. That’s a little treat for anyone that tunes into this episode. They can hear me butcher our intro. Well, we have a great guest today that we’re very excited to be speaking with. Thomas Griffin is joining us. He is the Chair of the Religion Department at a Catholic high school on Long Island. We’ll talk more about that. And he is an OSV author. He’s written a book about Saint Francis called “Let US Begin: Saint Francis, His Way of Becoming Like Christ and Renewing the World.” And apart from that, he has another Web project called “The Empty Tomb” and even a magazine. So we’ll talk about all of those projects and more. Thomas, welcome to Godsplaining.

Thomas: Guys, thank you so much for having me, excited to be here.

Fr. Patrick: Our joy. So we promise our listeners that in the next 20 minutes or so, we will develop a game plan to return all of Long Island to the Catholic faith. And Bishop Barres will be very pleased with us.

Thomas: [laughing] He’ll be very happy – we can do this. We can do this. 

Fr. Patrick: That’s our plan. Good. But why don’t we start? Why don’t we start with the book? That’s kind of your most recent project, and that’s something that I poked around in a little bit earlier this fall. I preached at the Franciscans Annual Transitus event at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land. It’s the observance of the passing of Francis of Assisi into eternal life. So it’s held on the vigil of is feast. They do a big thing. And I thought, gosh, I really need to know something about Saint Francis and a lot of the books about Saint Francis are crazy. Which one should I trust? And I picked up the newly published OSV book about Saint Francis, which is your own book. So I know the book has a little bit of an interesting story as to its genesis, and I wondered if you’d share that with our listeners why you chose to write a book about Saint Francis.

Thomas: Yeah, sure. So the the book is dedicated to my wife, which husband’s out there, and it’s always brownie points. If you dedicate a book to your wife, it’s a great way to go. So but it really is true. It exists because of Joanna. It really had to do with my own encounter, with my own brokenness. So there was a moment of just really just uncharitable ness to my wife when I was speaking to her, and I was kind of not relenting on it, not asking for forgiveness right away, not realizing it. And I did ask for forgiveness the next day and make a good, beautiful wife, she you know, she forgave me right away instantly without even thinking about it. That happened in mid-August, late August. School starts back up in September, in the back of the chapel my office at school is like five steps from chapel, which is pretty cool part of my job. But in the back of the chapel we have about a life size Crucifix. I spent a lot of time and prayer back there, so I was praying for the cross and for whatever reason that day I was reflecting on the shame of the sin that day, even though I knew I had been forgiven, I gone to confession, and for whatever reason that day I felt like in my shame that Jesus was attracted to my brokenness, that it wasn’t something that he was afraid of, but something he was scared of. He wasn’t condoning what I did. He didn’t like what I did, but he wasn’t afraid of it. And he wanted to restore it and wanted to rebuild it. He was attracted to it, and for whatever reason I thought of Francis. Maybe it was because of just the life size crucifix and the agony of Christ or my own brokenness, and I felt like Jesus wants to rebuild it. So I had this idea about Francis and his life and the little bit I knew about him, you know, at the time I outlined the book. And then I dove into research by the benefit of knowing Fr. Mary-Mary Ames, kind of recommending a bunch of books to me to read. So really the premise of the book is that one’s own dedication to their personal conversion will renew the world. If every single person did that, it would renew the world. So that happened to me. That’s still like a lifelong journey for myself. But in that experience of myself and my brokenness, coupled with when we look at the culture in the Church and everything going on, we can despair and we can say, you know what? What am I going to do? How can I change anything? And Francis says, What you can change is being radical in your love for Christ. And ultimately that will change the world.

Fr. Gregory: So people have all kinds of notions as to what holiness is. For instance, I think like extroverts are at a disadvantage because most people assume that extroverts are like artificial or superficial, and introverts are like whatever, deep and mystical, not necessarily the case. Also, people assume that people from the mid-Atlantic are loud and rude when truth be told, we’re actually quite cool. Now, St Francis of Assisi is one of those guys who kind of shatters notions as to what constitutes holiness. Not that he is himself an iconoclast, but he does kind of shake things up and get us to focus on what’s essential, displacing what is inessential. So on your own reading about Saint Francis were the things that you were kind of surprised by, shocked by, or are there ways in which you kind of reoriented your understanding of of holiness?

Thomas: Yeah, definitely. I think for me, you know, I admit in the book I’m not like the full blown expert on Saint Francis or Franciscan charism, which isn’t something you should do probably when you’re writing a book on a person. But it’s just how it is, how I roll like it’s real. It is true. 

Fr. Gregory: Dear audience, I’m making this up. Sincerely, the author. 

Thomas: Please buy this book.

Fr. Patrick: Welcome to Godsplaining!

Thomas: That’s why you had me on the show. Because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Fr. Gregory: Bingo, you fit in.

Thomas: Really, the book is about what Francis has done to me, and ultimately that means what Jesus has done in me. So in my reading of the book, when I was doing the research for me, I think holiness was I got to do all these things, I got to pray, I had to go to church, I got to be loving, I got to act the right way. And the more that I looked at the writings of Francis and what people wrote about him, who knew him, he was radical. And he was radical in the sense that this moment that he had with Jesus to rebuild His Church, this encounter, he had the saints that knew him, people that knew him said that any time he saw a cross for the rest of his life, it would bring him to tears. So this idea of holiness is this reorientation of one’s heart to have Christ’s heart beat in them. And the more that I became captivated by Francis, the more I wanted that and the more that I saw him doing that to me. So Francis wanted to live like Jesus’ disciples did when they were traveling around with him for three years. So they didn’t own anything. And they went about preaching and begging and they lived in community. And Francis wanted to walk in the exact footprints of Jesus. So if you picture a valley of snow, no one’s walked through it. If Jesus was the only one to walk through it. Those are the only footprints – Francis wanted his feet exactly in those holes. And that’s how I wanted to live his life. So for us today, I think we have to be bold like that. And we see that young people, that people of all ages respond to radicalness because that’s what Jesus invites us to. But a radicalness of relationship, which you don’t have to be afraid of.

Fr. Patrick: One of the moments of the life of Saint Francis that I often think about is the spoliation, because it’s just so wild to me. So the spoliation of Francis of Assisi for our listeners, Thomas is always smiling. You know, he is he’s exactly why I’ve got the spoliation is the moment where Francis of Assisi, having decided to give his life to the Church, renounces his hereditary wealth. So he does this, you know, instead of saying to his dad, no, dad, you can keep your money and, you know, which is maybe how some of us would handle that, you know, in like a living room way back in the back of a family home. And if it were to leak out into public, it would be kind of subtle and then sideways conversation, well. Francis renounces his hereditary wealth by stripping naked in the public square and throwing himself at the feet of the Bishop of Assisi, which is a story that I love because it’s so wild, it’s just so dramatic, so clear and so total, you know, just being being being stripped naked, stripped bare, just like Christ on the cross. It’s a total offering of his life. Just total, total abdication, total handing over and the parts of the spoliation and of this instant, instance that this moment that has a particular personal significance to me is that now Carlo Acutis is buried in the chapel that marks the spot of the spoliation. I haven’t seen it yet. I haven’t yet been to Assisi. But someday I will go when the Lord wants it, and I will be able to pray in that chapel at Blessed Carlo’s Tomb. And I love this confluence because Carlo was as well totally given over to Christ. You know, he lived a life where he was totally given over to the Lord Jesus. A little, a little bit more, sadly, I would say, maybe than Saint Francis of Assisi, who was known for this in many other dramatic gestures. But I wondered, do you have a favorite moment from the life of Saint Francis that lives rent free in your head? You know, I have this moment of this, the spoliation that that is just compelling to me. And part of the reason why it’s compelling as well, saying Dominic never did anything like that, you know, he always kept his clothes on. He was good that way. But yeah. So what’s, what’s a striking moment of the life of Saint Francis for you?

Thomas: Yeah. This notion that, you know, Jesus demands everything of those who follow him. I think that moment when he renounces everything, strips naked, like it really does convey that…something that sticks out to me, I would say is in his writings about, you know, obedience. He talks about, you know, and this is true for me in my married life. I try to in the book talk about how the religious life works for Francis, what he says and then how it’s applicable for, you know, whether it’s priesthood, but also primarily from my life as a married man. For laypeople, obedience is true in marriage, in career. But he said that if you want to see the picture of obedience, picture a dead body. You put a dead body on a throne. And if you can dress it up however you want and everyone sees the king, you can put a dead body and you can lift his head up and look up towards the sky. Down you get the point. But the dead body is completely at the whim of the one who moves it. And this is true obedience to Jesus Christ and his Church and his teachings that if we want to live out obedience, we are like a dead body that is in life. And by him and all of these ways that Francis, you know, there’s so many stories of what happens where he knocks on the door dressed up as somebody else to find out if one of the groupings of brothers is celebrating incorrectly or incorrectly. And he actually gets in and he sees them dining and wining and it goes and he gets all the beggars outside and he brings them in and he says, they shall dine with us. You know, they’re the ones that you’re supposed to be out serving. They shall dine with us. So in doing the research for the book, I was really invigorated by the project because unfortunately, Francis is often defined by being a statue and a garden and just being a guy who said, talk to animals again, blessing animals. We have all of that stuff. All that stuff is fine and good. He’s also often known to people, some people mistakenly attribute to him that, “You should preach always, sometimes use words.” he never actually said that. We don’t have that attributed to him anywhere. Francis was a preacher and he lived radically. And I think the more that we uncover his life, the more I see that if we want to be like him, we have to live radically as well.

Fr. Gregory: One of the things that I love about Saint Francis of Assisi is that he makes me deeply uncomfortable in all the right ways. Father Patrick mentioned like one nudity incident, but based on my reading of the sources, Saint Francis is like always just naked. He just loves being naked. He’s like, Ooh, temptation for chastity. Let’s make ourselves a snow family. You know? It’s like all temptation to chastity. It starts ourselves in a rosebush. He’s like, Ooh, the end is nigh. Lay me out on the ground, boys. Hold on. Step one, strip me naked. It’s like, this guy’s totally nuts! He is totally nuts. People are like, Oh, my gosh, It must be, like, so great to, like, live with the saints. They’re just so and it’s just like, no, it’s terrifying. And it’s like, deeply discomforting, which I imagine is part of what it felt like for the Apostles living with the Lord Jesus, because we’re like, Alright, boys, let’s talk about which of us is the greatest? And the Jesus rolls up in the like, Ah, yeah, we shouldn’t have been doing that again, you know, It’s like, yeah, like living with Holy people is equal parts inspiration and revelation of your own ugliness, which is a kind of terrible thing. So yeah, like in your reading of Saint Francis, who is Altar Christos, you know, in the utmost sense, he just kind of forbids easy dismissal or he forbids trivialization because like the witness is so potent. Are there particular things in his life by which you like, just feel especially challenged? So, Father Patrick asked about things that live rent free in your mind, are there things that kind of haunt you or other things to kind of like lay hold of your heart and sees you in their kind of terrible clutches?

Thomas: Yeah. One, I mean, I will say that I am when I read the thing about obedience, I was like, actually violated by that. I was like, this is this and the dead body. I’m like, I can’t because I can’t do that. You know, that one definitely sticks out. I would say. So he has this understanding about, you know, this happens a lot for me since my life is like teaching religion. It definitely happens for priests. You know, people come up to us and they might say, can you pray for this person? So there’s a story of someone doing this for what, a companion of Francis. You know, they’re there together and I think this happens and they keep going a little bit and then they realize I pray for this person. So they get off the horse and Francis makes them walk back and, you know, go and pray with the person right away. So really, in his understanding, as soon as you’re asked to pray for someone, pray with him right then and there, you know, oftentimes when somebody asks me to pray for them. So, you know, definitely I pray for you. Pray for me, too. And then I never pray for them. I just never do. Like I might say to God, hey, can I please pray for you? I’m going to pray for everyone that I told I would pray for, you know, But that’s not really the intentionality that Francis to live by by or any of the saints. So the intentional move to kind of do things right away. There’s a story with Saint Bonaventure that they’re traveling together for him and Francis and in the middle of the night they’re saying the same room and Bonaventure pretends like he’s asleep and then…

Fr. Gregory: Classic.

Fr. Patrick: [laughing] I can see our Father Bonaventure doing this so I had to like…

Thomas: And like so he pretends he’s sleeping and a few minutes go by and he sees Francis and say, Oh, Francis is out like he’s sleeping. So Bonaventure finds, I guess I’ll go to sleep too. And right before he’s about to doze off, Francis gets out of bed and he gets on his hands and knees and on his face. And he prays throughout the whole entire night. Never goes to bed. And Bonaventure always remembered that. This, this is our leader. He is the one who’s on fire. I need to be on fire like him when I pray. So I would say he’s marked by this radical and this, but also by this intentionality, with his relationship with Christ that that really drove him to everything that he did. If you just look at him, he looks like and he probably was crazy. He probably was perceived definitely was perceived as. But I think there something nuts about this radical ness that he had. But it was all about intentional relationship with Jesus.

Fr. Patrick: This cultivation and the intentional relationship with Jesus. I want to switch gears a little bit because you’re a high school theology teacher and you’re not only a high school theology teacher, a high school theology teacher at an all men’s high school, and I’ve been doing some layman’s reading. I can’t say it’s a lot of study, but there have been some some major news articles in the last few months about the rise in religious interest in Gen Z and especially among Gen Z males. And this is really where the story is because we’re seeing a decline in practice, in religious expression, certainly in a traditional religious religious practice among Gen Z women. And I wanted to know if that’s mapped onto your experience teaching at at an all men men’s high school. I mean, obviously you’re not going to see the decline among the women, but does it seem like the young men you’re encountering in the classroom are more interested in the faith? And, you know, if not, surely some are. What are the kinds of things that draw those who are?

Thomas: That’s a great question. It’s my sixth year there at the school. It’s kind of a unique situation. My twin brother, I have a twin brother, he also teaches there. We’re both in campus ministry. He teaches freshmen history of senior religion.

Fr. Patrick: Does he have a beard, too?

Thomas: He does, but it has more gray in it, it’s not as nice as mine. And he would admit that. He wouldn’t admit that, but he’d be wrong to not admit it. So the kids confuse us all the time. You know, we do have a unique team there. And I’m not just saying that we have a very dedicated team of people constantly praying for the students. I would say in the last 2 to 3 years, I’ve seen an uptick in their interest. Could be a lot of different variables. We’ve kind of revamped our retreat program there and also aspects of our curriculum to focus more on being real with the students. So it’s kind of connected to Saint Francis. And, you know, he was so real with what he desired and how it is hard to live out the faith. And we’ve found that when we are real and when we’re challenging and upfront with the kids about what the faith is, what it asks of you, but also what your identity is as a follower of Christ, that they respond to that. So there’s really been a shift to doing that in the last few years at school and it’s been exciting to be a part of it. So we have a little under 1700 students at our school. So class sizes are anywhere between 25, 35 kids. But every single year as a student, you go on retreat. That’s mandatory within religion class. And then every year there’s optional retreats. As overnight retreats, there’s adoration. Before every lunch period, we’ve confessions twice a week during the mornings. And we instituted this year an optional mass on every Tuesday morning before and in homeroom.

And we have between 125 guys come in every Tuesday for mass. And that’s just something we started last Lent. And we said, let’s keep it going. And so I would say that there is a response to it. And what they respond to is a real witness of a teacher and how their journey of faith has been impactful for them, but also how they’ve struggled coupled with the Eucharist. Now that if if we stress real faith experience and we stress, you know, every desire of your heart is a desire ultimately for Christ in the Eucharist, Mass and adoration is what we do the most of on retreat. They respond to that and tremendously so it’s not really are doing it’s his doing. Yeah.

Fr. Patrick: In a couple context recently you know I bet they’ve been thinking of and sharing my own high school experience which was a one lent a friend of ours got a group of us to start going to daily mass. We just went one day a week. It was just Wednesday mornings, but that led to me becoming a daily communicant, which I’ve been for years now, and that that really had just like going to Mass on another day that was not Sunday during Lent, had a transformative effect in my life and made my experience of Christ. So that that totally tracks with my my own experience and was a major source of my own vocation. So this is very interesting to me.

Thomas: Yeah, maybe an optional was great. They come in on their own volition, so. Right, optional. And it’s quiet and it’s prayerful and they love it.

Fr. Gregory: I think like this this does paint in broad brush strokes or to speak in crass generalizations, but I think that like 25 years ago, when people in campus ministry were trying to track men, they would be like, yeah, it’s like, not that hard. There’s just like a couple of things that you need to do and it’s like, good kind of. But as it turns out, men aren’t attracted by that. Men are attracted by the prospect of something difficult for which they can make a sacrifice that’s ultimately like meaningful and purposeful. So we’re like seeing these kind of societal trends where the difficulty becomes part of the kind of proselytizing or evangelization or testimony or witness. Can you speak a little bit to like part of Francis’s life is inimitable like that, like the nuts part, also like the stigmata part, also like the everything part. And yet there’s something about it that’s really attractive, you know, like really amiable. And I think part of it is, you know, like, you keep using the word radical or radicality, but like, Oh, I don’t know. Could you speak a little bit to your experience, maybe in the context of campus ministry and this like provocation of sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Saint Francis, of those kind of mentors in the school situation, who will model to them that that. Yes. Can you Yeah. Can you just talk to that or talk about that a little bit.

Thomas: Yeah, sure. So the the connection here I think with Francis is that when we say radical, he just wanted to follow Jesus because he, he was captivated by him. So I think placing students in a context in which they can be captivated by Jesus and we have found that the most effective way to do that is to have a very powerful reflection in the context of Eucharistic adoration with an invitation for students and a challenge for students to say, Hey, if you experience something tonight like experience God in a different way, you have to do something with that. And that could mean every Monday, Thursday, we have confession like go to confession. It can mean I’m going to go to adoration before lunch every day. I found that there we can we can place them in the position to have this really great experience of the faith. But if there’s no follow up with a practical challenge and by that we mean like, continue the relationship with Jesus. That’s the challenge. Without giving them the practical ways of doing that, it kind of just becomes this one experience that was positive. But it doesn’t it doesn’t really lead to anything. The beauty of being a part of a school, even though it’s a big school having, you know, I think we have six or seven teachers, a part of campus ministry, not all of them religion teachers and then we have 16 or 17 religion teachers in the school. There’s just a lot of there’s a lot of ways for students to ask people I want to pray like, how should I pray? So I have found that doing those things, facilitating a powerful encounter which is really Christ, either speaking through the witness of somebody, but in the context of adoration, along with the practical steps of saying, for example, like we had a senior evening of recollection teacher gave kind of his witness, his mother died of cancer, an unbelievable story of him. His mother was praying a Novena to St. Therese  that he would find that she was praying that he would find his wife before she died. And he went on a retreat. And on this retreat, he did meet the woman that he was going to marry. And the day he came home from the retreat, they finished the novena and somebody came with like flowers to the house, same flowers that were on the scapula of Therese. So he’s telling this encounter about terrorism, the importance of faith in his life, in the context of adoration, talking about how his mother died and the students are moved by that because we all have mothers and we all love our mothers. And at the end of adoration…

Fr. Gregory: Especially on Long Island.

Thomas: Especially on Long Island, and we say we can say to them at the end, like, you know, our faith is true. This guy is a real guy. He’s a normal guy, coaches soccer, has a family. But he had this experience with Christ that has changed the course of his life. And Jesus wants that for you, too. So how do you do that? This is your last year in Catholic school. Make a commitment to praying every day to get into Mass, to go into confession. And if you do that, you allow Christ. Then he’ll change you.

Fr. Patrick: Awesome. Thomas, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Again, for our listeners, the book is Let US Begin: Saint Francis Way of Becoming Like Christ and Renewing the World. Let us begin. It’s available at the O.C.V. Catholic Bookstore dot com or Amazon or wherever you get your books. Where else can listeners follow you and find out more about your projects?

Thomas: Awesome. Yes. So Empty Tomb Project title work is kind of a site where has primarily you do some writing online, some other smaller projects, but primarily writing online. Empty Tomb Project is a nonprofit evangelization company that I started two years ago. So we have a print magazine that we do primarily just on Long Island. We’re hoping to expand that in the next few years, but empty tomb project talk work would have all the information people are looking for more.

Fr. Patrick: Awesome. Thanks so much. Turning to you, the listener, thanks so much for tuning into this episode for all you do to support our podcast. If you’re able to make a financial donation to us, we’d encourage that. Please consider becoming a Patreon benefactor. Be sure to like and subscribe to God’s plan wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media. We’re on Facebook, X as it’s called Tik Tock. Instagram. Probably other things too. I think that’s most of them are information on Godsplaining events and on Godsplaining merch can be found on our website. And that’s over at Godsplaining.org. And in the meantime, friends know that we’re praying for you and we ask that you would pray for us. God bless.