The Catholic Defender: With Catholic Convert William Hensworth's Podcast The Friendship of the Church Fathers and
- Donald Hartley
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Mike Aquilina is author or editor of more than thirty books, including The Fathers of the Church, The Mass of the Early Christians, and A Year with the Church Fathers.
Mike has co-hosted eight series that air on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN).
He has co-authored books with Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., and theologian Scott Hahn.
He is past editor of New Covenant magazine and The Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper.
He appears weekly on Sirius Radio's "Sonrise Morning Show."
Mike and his wife, Terri, have six children, who are the subject of his book Love in the Little Things.
In 2011 Mike was a featured presenter of the U.S. Bishops' Diocesan Educational/Catechetical Leadership Institute.
He also wrote the USCCB's theological reflection for Catechetical Sunday in 2011.
His reviews, essays and journalism have appeared in many journals, including First Things, Touchstone, Crisis, Our Sunday Visitor, National Catholic Register, and Catholic Heritage.
He contributed work on early Christianity to the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought.
Mike is a also poet whose works have appeared in U.S. literary journals and have been translated into Polish and Spanish.
He shared songwriting credits with Grammy Award-winner Dion DiMucci on the forthcoming album "Tank Full of Blues."
Mike grew up in a sicilian ghetto in which it was expected that everyone was Catholic.
With the upheaval of the ’60’s, when he was in the 6th grade, Catholic education seemed to become devoid of content.
He began to think that Christianity was irrelevant and something not to be taken seriously.
In college, he fell totally away from the faith.
Through his undergraduate years, though he wasn’t attending Mass, he began to be exposed to Catholic culture and beauty by his studies of history and art.
In a poetry class, while translating a poem of St. Thomas Aquinas, God led him back to the Catholic Church.
Mike Aquilina joins William Hensworth to discuss the church fathers and their role in evangelizing.
Mike is a leading expert on the Church Fathers and we go through many examples to show how important friendship was to the spread of the Gospel.
We also discuss how we can use this method in our own time. Mike wrote a great book about this topic titled "Friendship and the Fathers":
How The Early Church Evangelized".
