We go now to Rosa in Lowell,
Massachusetts, listening on the Station
of the Cross. Rosa, you are on with
Patrick Lencioni, what's your question?
First of all I wanted to say thank you
to Patrick. I listened to a conference of
his once and he said, "I am Catholic," and
at the same time--I was shopping at the
same time, I was ecstatic because I'd never
seen anyone in the business conference
talk like that, so thank you so much
Patrick. My question is, how do people
take that from you when you say that? When you come out of the conference,
do people say anything to you? Yes, in fact--
thank you very much, Rosa--they almost
always do, and usually they come to me
and they say, "Thank you for doing that."
I've had people say, "I'm not a
Catholic and I appreciate that you do
that;" I've had people say that "I used to be
and I really like that you do that;" and a
lot of Catholics come and say, "Thank you
for doing that." More often than not,
because we all feel afraid to do that,
when somebody does that publicly, it
gives people hope and courage to do it
themselves. You know, I've started doing
a lot of speaking at the evangelical
churches and at leadership conferences,
and I always decided that I would come
out and I would announce that I was
Catholic. And I will tell you a story: I
once actually was--there's
a megachurch that asked me to be their
preacher. Now that's not something I can
do at a Catholic Church because I'm not
a priest, and I called a priest, and I said, "Am
I allowed to preach at a Protestant
Church?" And he said, "Yeah, absolutely."
And so I went there and I got up there,
might have been 5,000 people in the
congregation, and the the the minister
introduced me by saying, "Pat's a Catholic,
and you'll never guess that he actually
went to church before he came here!" And
that's the first time anybody has ever
done that. Now these were Protestants.
They broke out into applause, because
they knew I was Catholic and I'd gone to
Mass. And so I think we Catholics, and
Christians that are not Catholic, have to,
you know...they say, "Go out and preach the
Gospel, and occasionally use words;" it
didn't say "never use words." Just
declaring "Yes, I'm happy being a Catholic
and I'm proud of that, and now let me be
a good consultant,
a good marketer, or whatever else." I don't
think that there's anything wrong
with saying that, especially today when
people are afraid. And so, yeah, I will
tell you Maria, only a few times have I
gotten punished for it, and it was not
very hard to be punished for it. I've
never had it be what I thought...I will
tell you, I did have a company tell me
not to mention God in one of my talks,
and they said, "You can't come here if you
mention God," and I said, "Well here's the
deal, I'm a Christian and a Catholic, I'm
not there to proselytize but I can't
promise--yeah, I am who I am." And they said,
"Ok, that's ok."
And in my talk I said, "Well, I don't think
God made us to to have to hate our jobs,"
because I was talking about that, and at
the end I said, "God bless you." They never
complained, and employees from the
company came up and said, "Thank you for
witnessing. We don't do that
here." Wow. So Rosa, I think we can do
it more, and you know what
Jesus said in the Beatitudes; when they do persecute us for it, let's
rejoice, because our reward will be great
in Heaven. Now it's not always easy for
me, but I've always found it to be
not as bad as I thought.
Thanks, Rosa. Thank you! God bless you, Rosa.
