Youtube Interviews
In this episode of Roadmap to Heaven, host Adam Wright welcomes special guest Dr. Alex Schimpf, the incoming headmaster for the Chesterton Academy of St. Louis. The conversation centers around the domestic church movement and family spirituality.
Dr. Alex Schimpf explains how he and his family got involved in the domestic church movement. He shares his initial hesitation about joining but recognizes the practicality it offers for Catholic families in fulfilling their religious mission. He outlines the seven basic practices involved, which include: daily personal prayer, daily reading of sacred scriptures, daily prayer as a couple and as a family, establishing a rule of life, planning a yearly retreat, and meeting with a group of other couples and a Catholic priest monthly for support.
The speaker emphasizes the need for accountability and support in practicing these religious activities, sharing his involvement in a monthly circle for prayer, guidance, and formation. He also emphasizes organizing family retreats to foster spiritual growth. He points out the social nature of human beings and how banding together with other families can make the impossible possible.
Bringing up the challenges faced by many Catholic parents, Dr. Schimpf encourages taking initiative and being proactive. He highlights the importance of seeking support from others while acknowledging that with the Holy Spirit and the sacrament of marriage, Catholic parents have the responsibility to lead their families.
Dr. Schimpf closes the conversation by discussing his new role as headmaster of the Chesterton Academy of St. Louis and initially being skeptical but becoming intrigued by the curriculum. The curriculum includes daily Mass, theology, humanities, philosophy, Latin, music, art, and drama. He explains that the emphasis on both intellectual and emotional formation is what drew him to the new school.
Overall, this episode of Roadmap to Heaven shares the concept of the domestic church movement, highlighting Dr. Alex Schimpf’s personal experience with it. Listeners are encouraged to check out more information about the movement and Dr. Schimpf’s new school, the Chesterton Academy of St. Louis.
Adam Wright:
We are always happy to meet new people. I’m always happy to meet new people. Today, we are pleased to welcome, not quite to St. Louis yet because he’s not here yet, boots on the ground, but Alex Schimpf, who’s the new incoming headmaster for the forming Chesterton Academy of St. Louis. We’ll talk more about Chesterton Academy a little bit later. Today, we’re going to be talking about the domestic church movement and family spirituality. So, Alex, on behalf of all of us here at Covenant Network, almost welcome to town, but thanks for being with us on Roadmap to Heaven this morning.
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Thank you. So happy to join you.
Adam Wright:
So, we were introduced by a mutual friend who said, “Oh, you gotta meet this guy, Alex.” We started talking and immediately – you know, Roadmap to Heaven, we’re always talking about practical ways that we can grow in holiness, is especially families. One of my main goals when we started this show was that when my wife was driving the kids to school in the morning, she could have the radio on, and it would not just be relevant to her, but relevant to the whole family and safe for the whole family. So when you said domestic church movement, alarm bells start going off in my mind. Like, okay. We’ve got to get this guy on. We’ve got to talk to him on the air. So tell us a little bit about, it sounds pretty straightforward, but what is the domestic church movement?
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned practical, because that’s really how I was brought into this. I was one of these guys who just wanted to become a saint by going to my parish and doing the regular Catholic stuff. So when my wife first told me, “Hey, let’s go to this info meeting for this domestic church movement thing,” I said, “I don’t want to do that. I’m happy not joining a cult. Let’s try to avoid that.” But what I found out about it, that’s what it was: it was a practical way for us to achieve what every Catholic family is supposed to achieve, which is being a domestic church. To have a religious mission from God that you execute. So when I found out about it, then a lot of my obstacles were overcome. How I would describe it, it’s just bringing some accountability, formation, and support to basic Catholic practices. So I joke about it being a cult, but it really isn’t. We don’t make any religious promises to anyone. There’s no special hat or handshake.
But what we do is we commit to a certain set of basic Catholic practices. There are, I believe, seven of them. Daily personal prayer, daily reading of the sacred scriptures, daily prayer as a couple, daily family prayer. Now if you don’t have children, that’s the one you get to cheat on. Your couple prayer and your family prayer can be the same thing. Having a rule of life, and I’ll talk about what that is in a second, drafted by you and your spouse, again, not given to you by anyone else. Trying to make a yearly retreat as a couple or as a family. Seems like I might be forgetting one. How many is that? I hope you were keeping track.
Adam Wright:
I don’t do math this early in the morning. It’s not good for any of us involved.
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Right. And then finally, it’s not one of our seven practices we commit to, but also for support in those practices, we meet monthly with a group of other couples and a Catholic priest. And we call that our “circle” where we just share joys and sorrows together. We pray together. We report on the fruits and difficulties of doing these practices, and then Father can be there to interject and guide us and give us some formation. So I want to say at the beginning, again, I didn’t get into this because I was looking to do something weird, but my wife and I recognized, fundamentally, that we were flakes. Alright? Like, we would start praying the Rosary as a family, and we would be great for three months. And then things would get busy, and we would let the whole thing go. Then it’d be months before we’d pick it back up. So we just had to honestly admit, there are couples out there who do this domestic church thing perfectly without any support. That’s not us. We need the shame of looking at another couple once a month and saying, “Hey, we didn’t quite get family prayer done.” And we found that God brought a lot of grace through that. So that’s our story, in a nutshell.
Adam Wright:
I love it because nothing that you’re saying is new, but it is all good, and it’s good to have that support structure. I’m thinking of how often do we do interviews here at Covenant Network and on Roadmap to Heaven? Every day. Yet today, as we’re getting ready for our interview with you – and for those of you listening on the radio, we’re connected via Zoom right now, so that we can see one another for the interview. And we actually will make this video available on our YouTube page and on our social media. We’ll share that with you later. But as we’re getting set up and, “Alright, are we ready to interview Alex?” “Yes. We’re ready.” And we do this every day. And yet, I’m like, “I can’t hear him. I can’t hear him. What is it?” I didn’t plug the cable in, something that you have to do every time you have a microphone or a connection to do an interview. You have to plug the cable in. And luckily, there was someone here to say, “Adam, plug the cable in.” Okay. Got it. Check. So, that is amazing to have that support network, and humbling to hear that we’re not the only family out there that needs someone to help remind them like, “Hey, do all of these good things for your family to grow in holiness. And by the way, let’s do them together so that we have even more fun with them.”
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Exactly, yeah. My favorite line, and my background is in philosophy, and I love Aristotle best. We call him Saint Aristotle. I know that’s a hilarious joke no one gets. But he’s got this line: “With others, we are more able to think and act.” And I have found that to be so experientially true in my life, whether it’s working out, whether it’s studying. And then finally, even your spirituality and prayer in a family, you band together with other families and suddenly the impossible becomes possible, through our social nature as human persons.
Adam Wright:
Yeah. I’m thinking immediately of our family, and it’s been a while since we’ve gotten to all go on retreat at the same time. I don’t think we’ve ever actually done that with all of the kids that we have now. We’ve done it before we had five kids. But it doesn’t have to necessarily be a formal program that you go to the retreat center and they’re presenting everything. You might have a good connection with a priest, whether it’s in your parish or your diocese, and you can wrangle up some families and go rent some cabins somewhere and say, “We’re going to have a retreat” and everybody gets their own cabin. Father gets his own cabin. You have Mass together. You have talks. You have community time together. It really could take on any number of shapes and forms here.
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Oh, I love that. We had domestic church families do that during the pandemic. I was so edified, because as a movement, we arranged some family retreats every summer, at different times of the year and evangelization retreats. But when all the retreat centers shut down, there were some circles that were just such hard chargers. They said, exactly like you said, “Father, if we just rent these cabins for a week, will you just come say Mass for us and we’ll just have a retreat?” and they did it. And I thought, “Man, that’s exactly the way we should be as Catholic parents”, and we just don’t take no for an answer. We get this done. We can do that. We sometimes forget because so much is done for us, as Catholics. That’s great because, again, we’ve already established, I’m a little bit of a slacker. But at the same time, we can show that kind of initiative. We are given the Holy Spirit and confirmation to be able to lead our families in this way, and then further strengthened by the sacrament of marriage. So we really have no excuses, but we just need to humble ourselves to know we need to do this with other people. That’s the key.
Adam Wright:
Perfect. I can only think of my children who are like, “You want us to do what? Are there gonna be other kids there, Dad?” And when they find out, yes, there are other kids. “Okay, we’re good. Take us anywhere. There’s food. There’s kids. There’s fun. There’s outdoors. We are happy to go.” Alex, it’s been wonderful to speak with you this morning about the domestic church movement. I do want to make real quick mention, because people might be saying, “Wait. Hold on. You said Chesterton Academy at the top of the interview. I haven’t heard of this one.” So tell us just really quickly here about the Chesterton Academy of St. Louis.
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Oh, it’s fantastic. So I happen to see this job bulletin of this new Catholic high school starting in St. Louis And you’re from St. Louis, so you know that’s kind of dicey. That’s kind of exciting. St. Louis has a lot of high schools. So I originally went and looked at it kind of like you might stop to watch a house fire or a car accident, but then I looked at the curriculum and I fell in love. Daily Mass is not just optional. It’s a part of the formation. It is a requirement. Well, okay, that’s pretty good because I go to daily Mass and I really want a job that provides for that. And then I looked deeper in the curriculum and was astounded: it has both intellectual formation, but especially effective formation, formation of the heart. So you’ve got what you might expect. Four years of theology, history, humanities, but also four years of philosophy, four years of Latin. So you’re thinking, “Okay, this is an incredibly intellectually formative school.” But there are also four years of music and choir, four years of art, and four years of drama. Every student is going to be in a play. So it’s really forming the emotions as well.
So once I saw this curriculum, I kind of just had to be involved. I knew it was going to be a wild adventure. Again, you’re starting a high school. You have to find a location. You have to convince some students to join you, and some teachers, but I knew this is worth it because I had just never seen a curriculum so strong. I thought, if I ever started a high school, this is exactly the curriculum I would put in place, but they’re giving it to me in a box. And I like this. Again, I’m a slacker. Tell me what to do, and I will do it. I will shut up and color when the picture is beautiful. So I am so excited about Chesterton Academy.
Adam Wright:
Excellent. Well, friends, for more information on that, the website, Alex is?
Dr. Alex Schimpf:
Chesterton Academy St. Louis. Just search that in Google.
Adam Wright:
Alright, we’ll put that out there, we’ll put the link in the description today. We’ll save you a little bit of homework here. See, we have a “cate-quiz” segment where, normally, we ask catechetical quiz questions, but as the new headmaster, we might just start throwing all of these St. Louis questions at you. What is toasted ravioli? What is frozen custard? And where do you go for that when you’re in town? But we’ll spare you that today. Alex, we want to thank you for being with us. We do need to take a break. We’re past time on a break here on Roadmap to Heaven, and we look forward to having you back with us. Everybody else? Well, we’ve got more Roadmap to Heaven in store. Stay tuned.
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