The Catholic Gentleman: Living Authentic Manhood Today

By Sam Guzman and Dale Ahlquist

What it means to be a man or a woman is questioned today like never before. While traditional gender roles have been eroding for decades, now the very categories of male and female are being discarded with reckless abandon. How does one act like a gentleman in such confusing times?

The Catholic Gentleman is a solid and practical guide to virtuous manhood. It turns to the timeless wisdom of the Catholic Church to answer the important questions men are currently asking. In short, easy- to-read chapters, the author offers pithy insights on a variety of topics, including

• How to know you are an authentic man
• Why our bodies matter
• The value of tradition
• The purpose of courtesy
• What real holiness is and how to achieve it
• How to deal with failure in the spiritual life

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: May 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781681496498

Book preview

THE CATHOLIC GENTLEMAN

SAM GUZMAN

THE CATHOLIC GENTLEMAN

Living Authentic

Manhood Today

Foreword by Dale Ahlquist

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) Copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, © 1994, 1997, 2000 by Libreria Editrice Vaticana—United States Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph by Mary Grace Pingoy

Cover design by John Herreid

© 2019 by Ignatius Press

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-068-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68149-649-8 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2018931251

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

1 The Quest for Authenticity

2 The Gift of Manhood

3 Fathers and Sons

4 Putting the Man in Gentleman

5 The Many Faces of Manhood

6 Style Advice from a Saint

7 Virtue

8 A Brief Guide to Happy Drinking

9 Fatherhood

10 The Code

11 The Body

12 Tradition

13 Suffering

14 Courtesy

15 The Call to Protect

16 Holy Matrimony

17 The Value of Work

18 Who Wants to Be a Saint?

19 Three Spiritual Offices

20 The Essence of Holiness

21 The Knowledge That Matters

22 Showing Up

23 What Is a Catholic Gentleman?

24 Fail Forward

25 No One Is Saved Alone

26 Prayer

27 Purity

28 Happiness and Holiness

29 The Gift of Faith

30 The Marian Way

31 Living Icons

32 The Cross

APPENDIX A: The Catholic Gentleman's Rule of Life

APPENDIX B: The Catholic Gentleman's Reading List

NOTES

More from Ignatius Press

FOREWORD

The word gentleman has fallen into disrepute, along with the word man. There is a connection. Gentlemen have become ungentlemanly in direct correlation with men becoming unmanly. It started, however, with gentlemen not doing their bit.

It is a paradox that the word gentleman was traditionally applied to a man not immediately associated with gentleness, as it were. It was a word given to a knight. Knights were dubbed Sir when they had achieved a certain valor, proving themselves brave and worthy in every respect, and often that involved bravery in battle and actions that were anything but gentle. Along with his title, a knight was given property. He was the defender not only of a fortress but also of a field. And a family.

The knight knew how to plant and build as well as how to fight. He also knew how to entertain, to put on a feast, to sing, and to recite poetry. And he knew how to pray. He always set an example—when he stood, when he walked, when he sat, when he talked, and when he knelt, before his lady, and before his God.

Putting on armor was a rare event but a necessary one. The knight's greatest strength was in his restraint. He won love and respect without having to brandish his power. He followed an established set of rules. He knew that freedom existed within those rules—freedom for himself and for everyone who depended on him. He was civilized; he was not a barbarian. He was gentle because he was polite. G. K. Chesterton points out the forgotten connection between the words polite and police. Both refer to self-restraint, to keeping order, to following rules. Politeness watches over the polis, the city.

Along with politeness, which is about keeping order, the other characteristic of a gentleman is courtesy, which, as Chesterton says, means courtly behavior, the way a person acts in the presence of royalty. To show courtesy, as a gentleman would do, means to treat every man as if he were a king and every woman as if she were a queen. Courtesy is sublime humility and charity. As Chesterton notes, Saint Francis of Assisi treated even animals with courtesy.

Politeness and courtesy both rely on self-restraint. But, as Chesterton also points out, men have that strength in reserve that is sometimes called laziness. Yes, the virtue of self-restraint, like every good thing, can be put to the wrong use, as other virtues can be corrupted into vices; and a common male weakness, laziness, is the tendency to let other people do things. But the gentleman does things for himself. It is why he is a leader and an example. And it is why, when gentlemen started taking advantage of their position, it sparked a bad reaction from women. The male privilege to lead (which is to serve) became the opportunity to take and to abuse, to indulge and simply to have one's way. Gentlemen lost their sense of responsibility, their sense of honor, and their sense of reality.

When men stopped behaving like gentlemen, women stopped behaving like ladies. Women started asserting their rights because men had stopped recognizing them. Women started doing manly chores because men had stopped doing them. Women became detached from the home because men had become detached from the home.

The corruption of knighthood led to the rise of feminism. When gentlemen started caring only about the power and prestige that came with their position, they stopped being gentlemen. And the men who followed their example stopped being men, stopped acting responsibly and started acting selfishly, stopped leading with politeness and started leading with power. They cast aside their self-restraint and started strutting their mere strength. They became warlike, not in noble acts of defense, but in dastardly acts of aggression. Feminists merely followed the same bad example. With no gentlemen around to treat them like ladies, they stopped acting like ladies and instead started imitating all the worst unrestrained male behaviors. Ladies quit being queens when gentlemen quit showing courtesy.

Men have stopped showing courtesy. One of the most obvious places we see a lack of courtesy is on the Internet, in the unrestrained manner in which people address each other. The virtual world is not a virtuous world, as people type things to their onscreen adversaries that they would never say to a person sitting across the table. At least, not yet: There is nothing to stop this behavior from carrying over into the real world.

Not only are men not behaving like gentlemen on the Internet; they are not treating women like ladies. A man who regards a woman as no more than a soulless erotic image existing only for his gratification has become a barbarian, the very thing the good and gentle knight had to fight against. We need to bring back these knights. We need to bring back true gentlemen.

Sam Guzman has given us something we desperately need: a valuable, readable book to help make young men into gentlemen.

—Dale Ahlquist

PREFACE

Solomon, the wise king of old, opined somewhat bitterly that of the making of books there is no end (Eccles 12:12). And even though he lived three thousand years before mass-market paperbacks, e-readers, and Amazon existed, he was right. New books are published every day—hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them. As you glance at this book, you may be wondering: Why should I read this one?

That is a fair question, and there's only one legitimate answer: This book offers you something—some truth, some insight, that will leave you a better, happier, more complete man.

Now, some men write books because they are truly wise and have profound insights to offer. But I'm just an ordinary husband and father. I wrote this book not because I have some unique wisdom to share but because I believe that the Catholic and apostolic Church does.

I've found through experience that the Catholic faith is not some dusty museum piece of a religion, fit only for grandmothers and starry-eyed fanatics. Though it has been handed down through twenty-one centuries, it is not some petrified relic. It has outlived wars and persecutions, despots and diseases, and countless dangers, both internal and external. It has transformed sinners into saints and has sustained countless men just like you, who are struggling through this pilgrimage we call life.

I've found that, beneath all the caricatures and criticisms of the Catholic Church, she possesses something both relevant and real—the faith that is ever ancient and ever new.¹ I firmly believe that this faith has something to say to you as a man living today, and what it has to offer can change your life. For the substance of the faith is not some ivory-tower abstraction, or lifeless doctrines in heavy theology textbooks, but, rather, an encounter with a living Person, Jesus Christ. And he alone can make you the man you want and need to be.

Perhaps you're skeptical. Maybe this sounds like so many pious platitudes. Or maybe you're all in and can't wait to get started. Either way, I invite you on this journey of Catholic manhood. It is a path of adventure and struggle, failure and triumph, battle and romance. It isn't an easy road, but it is the only one worth taking—because the destination is so much better than you can imagine.

This book is intended to guide you toward that destination. It is not an exhaustive treatment of every aspect of manhood, past and present, nor is it an in-depth theological treatment of what it means to be a man. Others have already done an excellent job of writing books like those (see Behold the Man by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, for one example). Rather, this book offers short chapters on various aspects of manhood. Designed to be read in just a few minutes, they stand alone, focusing on a single idea. I pray that, like a good compass, each chapter is a reference that points you to what matters.

Let's go.

1

The Quest for Authenticity

AUTHENTIC. Genuine. Handcrafted. Vintage. Real. Something about those words stirs something in a man's soul. We don't like fake. We like things that are solid, strong, and can stand the test of time.

Case in point: Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a fascination with old cars. My stepfather would take us kids to classic car shows, the kind in oily McDonald's parking lots with French fries plastered to the pavement and the Beach Boys blaring over loudspeakers. Vintage hot rods and muscle cars would line the parking lot in row after row of ferocious beauty.

These cars were enough to make a Prius-driving, granola-eating eco-warrior screech in terror. Massive, eight-liter engines throbbed, pulsed, and growled, emitting bass notes so guttural you could feel them pounding in your chest. Oversized superchargers whined and howled, sucking air into jittering, four-barrel carburetors. Dancing side pipes belched exhaust, and tires melted in plumes of acrid smoke as drivers dropped the clutch, unleashing hundreds of horsepower on the quivering pavement.

It was awesome.

I still love muscle cars. Mustangs, Chargers,