TRANSFORMING PEOPLE one at a time is at the heart of God’s plan for the world. It is also essential to developing dynamic marriages, loving families, vibrant parish communities, thriving economies, and extraordinary nations. If you get the man right (or the woman, of course), you get the world right. Every time you become a-better-version-of-yourself, the consequences of your transformation echo through your marriage, family, parish, nation, and beyond to people and places in the future. It is God who does the transforming, but only to the extent that we cooperate. God’s grace is constant, never lacking. So our cooperation with God’s desire to transform us is essential; it is the variable. Are you willing to let God transform you?

Helping individuals with this transformation from who they are to who they are capable of being is the great work. Is the Catholic Church the best in the world at assisting men and women in becoming all God created them to be? Most people today would say no. We could argue about it, but we shouldn’t have to. Should we be unquestionably the best in the world at this? I think so.

For twenty years I have been speaking and writing about the genius of Catholicism. I have done this with the hope that it might help others to catch a glimpse of what Catholicism truly is and how it can transform us, and the world, if we embrace it. I suppose on a very basic level I want others to experience the joy that the Catholic faith has brought to my life.

In my travels I have noticed that some Catholics are more engaged than others, but I never really took the time to explore why. This is a regret I will live with for the rest of my life, because if I had taken the time to really understand the difference between highly engaged Catholics and disengaged Catholics, the work my staff and I have undertaken over these past two decades could have been infinitely more effective. That has all changed now. The ideas within this book have transformed the way I speak, write, and live. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This is how it all began. . . .

Several years ago I was having dinner with a group of priests in Minnesota before an event. I was the only non-cleric at the table, and some of the priests started talking about different things that were happening in their parishes. One of the priests was very young, and he was lamenting about how few people were actively involved at his parish. My mind was starting to drift toward what I was going to speak about at the event when I heard something that jolted me back into the moment. Sitting at the head of the table like a king was a warm, humorous, and completely down-to-earth priest who must have weighed 350 pounds and been almost eighty years old. Waving a finger down the table, he said to the young priest,“Listen, I have been the pastor of seven parishes over the past forty years, and I can tell you that it doesn’t matter where you go, you will discover the same fifty people do everything in a parish.”

The comment got my attention. I immediately wondered if it was true. In the following weeks I started making informal phone calls to some pastors I knew. I asked them questions like:

• Who are your most engaged parishioners?

• Why are they so engaged?

• What percentage of registered parishioners are actively involved in the parish?

• What percentage of parishioners give regularly to the parish?

The answers they gave me seemed to anecdotally support the priest’s comment, but I wanted data.

There is a concept known as the Pareto Principle. It states, in essence, that roughly 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes. In business this same concept is often referred to as the 80/20 principle. The idea is that 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers. For example, while Coca-Cola has liter