Sent

Father Stan is not your average

you lookin' at a priest, priest.

You lookin' at a guy that's like

yo what's up, you know, walkin' down the block

like you know, he's one of the boys.

Well, to be a Catholic priest

means that you bring the gospel

You bring the message of Jesus to souls,

to lead them to heaven,

teach them the truth about God,

about Jesus.

There's Catholics look at me

and say what's he doin'?

They think I'm upsetting the Catholic

culture sometimes.

Father Stan Fortuna acts like an overgrown teenager.

That's not acceptable for a priest.

Everybody will have critiques

even Jesus Christ was criticized.

If God himself couldn't be loved

by everybody, who can?

I became convinced of the fact

that I've been gifted,

I've been blessed,

I've been sent.

Yeah.

Nice, that's great.

I welcome back to life on the rock

and tonight we have Father Stan Fortuna.

Doing the show a bunch of times.

Uh.

Yeah.

You see, as a priest,

the area of my personal responsibility

really depends upon the person and the priest

that God is calling me to become.

The ultimate impact of my great hero,

the great saint Pope John Paul the second

can be summed up in the statement

he said that if the church holds back

from culture, the gospel itself falls silent.

If the gospel falls silent because of me,

woe's me.

I'm in some big trouble.

Not only on the day of judgement,

but I'm in some trouble today

because of the way that I live

or that I don't live.

Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict

very much stressed an idea called

"New Evangelization",

meeting people where they are

and this is precisely what was done

by our savior in the gospel.

Father Stan has the pulse

of young people.

He's able to bring the message of the gospel

in a cultural form that is comprehensible to them.

This is part of what the church

has tried to do throughout the ages.

So, you see the great medieval painters

like Blessed Angelico, the great renaissance painters

like Raphael, Michelangelo.

The church tries to present things

in the cultural envelope of the moment.

It's real old school and lazy

and check it out, it came real cool.

I was havin' breakfast with the brothers one mornin',

I was like lamenting about how so many

of the songs I got are like so intense

about suicide and about abortion

and about so many deep and intense things

that people are going through.

I said I just hope I have like a dumb, fun song,

so I went in the studio,

put down a real simple beat,

And Frankie turned out to be Saint Francis

and the point of the song turned out to be

about Saint Francis receiving the stigmata.

At the end of the song, it closes with a prayer

to Saint Michael the Archangel.

Just wound up being something deep and intense.

The Franciscans of the Renewal began

around 1987 with eight friars of the Capuchen Order,

which is a branch of the Franciscan order

and we were displeased

with some of the trends

that were taking place in religious life.

We felt that we should start a reform movement

withing the Capuchens,

but that did not work out

and so with the backing of the Holy See,

and with the patronage of Cardinal John O'Connor,

Archbishop of New York,

we started this little new community.

When we started here, this neighborhood

looked like Berlin the day the war was over.

Block after block were completely

burned out houses.

Mother Teresa told me as we walked down the street

that it was the worst thing that she had ever seen

in her life, that's pretty bad.

Pope Frances, as most people call him,

for me, I like to refer to him as Papa Francesco.

He says that Jesus makes problems.

You can not love Jesus without having problems

and I dare say if you want to have a problem,

go to the street to know Jesus.

You'll end up not having not one problem,

but many, it's making the statement

for the preference and for the priority of the poor.

Something so dear to my heart

and to the heart of the community

and Papa Francesco is making it clear

that this is dear to the heart of the church.

What's he saying?

You think that what?

Oh, that choo, okay choo right.

Well, for a priest to be doing it

it's pathetic, for a priest.

To adopt this worldly, very low form of music.

The jazz, rock, rap, this is all worldy music

and Father Stan's actions are

the action and manner that has always been

forbidden by the church for a priest

to adopt worldly mannerisms.

I was doing a radio interview one time,

the guy said to me, "You don't sound like a priest."

And I said to him, I says,

"Oh.", I said, "Hey." I says,

"What's a priest sound like anyway?"

What did he go to school to learn

how to talk like a priest?

I want to sound like a priest.

You can sound like a priest and not be one,

or you can sound like a priest and be a bad one.

Yeah, it's cool sometimes going up to the roof

and you get to see what's goin' on.

You see all the project buildings

and it's just massive amounts of people,

kinda squished all together

and there's, there's a lot of problems,

there's a lot of violence in there.

Papa Francesco was emphasizing

over and over and over again,

for the necessity of the church to go out,

he says, because the church that focuses

on itself and does not go out gets sick.

So, one time I was on the west side of Manhatten

and met this guy in the street