Welcome to Bro Apostles. I am Patrick Nevy, and today I am going to be presenting an interview that I did on the Catholic Entrepreneur podcast with Silas Monner.

It was a great conversation about a little bit about my book, a little bit about what Catholic business owners and Catholic professionals can do to help save their parish.

It was a great conversation. You're going to enjoy it.

Now let's get into the show. All right. Welcome to the podcast, Pat. How are you doing today? Doing well. How are you, Silas? Good to be here. I am glad to have you, man. Catholic Pat in the building. For anybody who follows you, is that your username everywhere or just on Substack? it's everywhere actually yeah I managed to get it was really nice a guy a guy who had it on

Instagram reached out to me like a couple years ago I was like hey I have

the catholic pat handle on instagram do you just want it and I was like dude thank you typically people

will like hold you hostage for that yeah they like pay me a million dollars and I'll they definitely

do that I had no money yeah I had no money so it's like I was like I can't take but he's a great he was a great guy and I still follow him but yeah so he he gave me that handle so now I have it everywhere TikTok Instagram blues guy which I don't post on yeah I was gonna say yeah I hope you don't go there man that's a dumpster part but no I I've always tried to get the username Silas because you don't, you would think

there's not that many, not that many siloises, but it's always taken. No matter how quickly I get to a brand new platform, it's always gone. I just go with my full name. But it's crazy you see those people that got their first name on Twitter. It's like, how does you do that? Exactly. Especially people like, you know, Jason, right?

Like, how did he deserve that?

Anyways, man. Well, I'm, Jason, right? Like, how did he deserve that? Anyways, man.

Well, I'm glad to have you on. So I just kind of give a little bit of preamble here. You run a podcast called BroPossils. You've been kind of popping off a lot on LinkedIn and Substack lately. And the main reason is because you're writing about how to save your parish, right? That's kind of the gist of what you're writing about, which is also the name of your recent book.

If you have to watch it, you can see I've got it here. And I guess not the only, this is not the only thing that you write about. The reason I think this is very interesting is that a lot of times we are talking about how Catholic entrepreneurs can be kind of catalysts, if you will, in their community. And I think a core part of that is the parish, right? And this is the main point of your book is how can we, I won't spoil it all, but how can we in general be the catalyst in our parish without some program or whatnot, right? So before we get into all of that and what I want

to have you talk about, can you just give us a little bit about who you are and kind of what you're up to? Yes, so, Patrick Nevy. I used to, my bio is like, oh, former stand-up comedian who's now theologian, which is true. I did, I did do stand-up comedy when I was, when I was young, was a young man, turn to my 20s like from about about 16 until 21, I did stand-up comedy. It was real fun, snuck into bars at 16 and did stand-up. But I kind of put that aside because I wanted a family, wanted to, you know, wake up at a normal time. So I just kind of stopped doing that. I studied theology at Francisco University, got my master's in systematic theology from there, but I've always been writing online and podcasting. We've been doing pro apostles. We were doing the podcast. It was called The Crunch before, but we've been doing that for about 10 years. So I've always been producing content online, and that's kind of been my deal, right? It's like I'm learning theology, talking about it on the internet, making it easier for people to understand, talking about it with, you know, young adults, high school students. That was kind of my deal. I was a youth minister for about four years in Pittsburgh and then I did what a lot of former youth ministers do when they have a kid and they realize they can't do it anymore as I went into sales.

Very common.

Because, you know, if you have, yeah, I know, like every, every former youth minister I know is a real estate agent. It's like, that's like the big thing. Nice. But, you know, it translates well, right? If you try to, you got to get eighth graders to listen to you talk about Jesus, you can get, you know, you can cold call a business owner. It's not a big deal.

The, the amount of, the amount of judgment and rejection you get is minimal compared to being a youth minister. But yeah, so I switched to that. I've been, I've been in sales since I left youth ministry. So another about three years or so. But in the meantime, always writing online talking about stuff. And, you know, my, my big, you know, my heart has always been for the church and for building up the church. And, you know, I, when I, you know, I thought, I thought, though, the way that I was going to do that was for working in the institutional church, but my life has kind of taken a turn to where I'm, I'm working as a parisher and building at my parish. My wife and I both, you know, do stuff at the parish that we, that I was baptized in,

that we got married and both, you know, do stuff at the parish

that we, that I was baptized in, that we got married in. And we spent a lot of our time, you know,

building up the community as lay people, as lay leaders in the parish. And, you know, just that

experience of after leaving ministry and still kind of doing ministry has been transformative for

the way I understand the lay role in the parish

...