NORTH AMERICA

A MOST RELEVANT TIME FOR RELEVANT RADIO
Fr. Francis "Rocky" Hoffman
Author: Colin Howell,  5 April 2020

It would be hard to find many Catholics in America today who don’t know the name Father Francis “Rocky” Hoffman. He is known for many great reasons but probably most notably for his role as CEO and Executive Director of Relevant Radio, the now massive, evangelistic Catholic radio ministry.

Such a simple mission conceptually: to reach out and evangelize people that are stuck every single day in their cars in traffic. The effectiveness of this ministry is hard to quantify. But if numbers tell us anything they show—under Father Rocky’s leadership and strong passion to bring the gospel message into the traffic jams of America—that Relevant Radio has grown into 171 AM/FM stations reaching a potential audience of 220 million people across the country and even more around the globe through their downloadable app.

It would be hard to argue that priests like Father Rocky don’t take their call to evangelization seriously. Obviously, to faithfully serve as the CEO, his daily life in many respects mirrors that of any successful business executive with frequent travel across the country, public speaking, fundraising, and relationship building, all to serve this highly effective apostolate, “to bring Christ to the world through the media.”

But Father Rocky didn’t just wake up one day and answer God’s call to be an effective leader. In today’s culture of get rich quick schemes and lose weight fast sales pitches, it might just be an appropriate moment to mention a few other salient facts of nature.

Apparently trees that grow rapidly above ground experience very slow or shallow growth of their rooting system, increasing instability the higher they grow. Furthermore, spring is the most rapid growth period for most trees’ rooting systems, when the soil is no longer frozen and the leaves are not yet budding, allowing the lion’s share of the tree’s energy to be directed towards deepening and widening said root system.

This is interesting because it mirrors how God works in people. Often times, perhaps because of our cultural attraction to the quick and easy, we think that those like Father Rocky were just called one day by God and immediately responded with effectiveness. We don’t often realize that Father Rocky, or the Apostle Paul and many others for that matter, had many years of preparation, of formation, where God molded and prepared them in the soil and secret springtime of life, a time before they entered into the full bloom of summer months for the rest of the world to see.

Father Rocky is certainly no slouch with his extensive educational background: a BA in history from Northwestern University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. But Father Rocky wouldn’t be Father Rocky had he not received many, many years of preparation and formation as simply a man with a life steeped in prayer and the sacraments.

And this daily sacramental life eventually led Father Rocky to ordination into the priesthood by St. John Paul II himself in 1992 and subsequently to continue advanced formation at our partner institution in Rome, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, where he completed a doctorate in Canon Law.

This formation, one not only rigorously academic but steeped in daily prayer and the sacraments, is the soil that Fr. Rocky or any leader needs to remain deeply rooted regardless of where God calls them.

This likely also has something to do with how he ongoingly handles sizeable organizational challenges with the simple motto, “If it were easy, it wouldn’t be evangelization,” and it might also have something to do why he is often found quoting another great modern-day Saint, Jose­maria Escrivá. “First prayer. Then sacrifice. In the third place, very much in the third place: action.”

If you agree with us that it is of paramount importance for the future leaders of the Church to receive a solid foundation of formation with an academically rigorous institution that also happens to be unabashedly steeped in prayer and the sacraments, then perhaps you would like to join us in supporting other future Church leaders in their critical formative years by clicking either the donate button at the top of the browser to play your own active role in the future of the global Church.