 Hi, I'm Mary Harrell for Tan Books and today we're talking to a modern-day prodigal son, very aptly, who is sharing a message of mercy with the world. Father Ken Jiraisi is a priest with the Fathers of Mercy and though he was raised a Catholic, he left the Catholic Church for many years, earning a business degree and racking up a lucrative career in technology. The father Ken eventually found his way back to the Catholic Church joining the Fathers of Mercy in 2006 and being ordained a priest in 2012. He's a missionary for sure, a webmaster and the vocation director for the Fathers of Mercy. Father Jiraisi is also the author of two books, Why Be Catholic, published by Tan in 2021. And his most recent book is Spiritual Warfare and Divine Mercy, The Weapon For Our Times. Father Jiraisi, thanks for joining us today. Mary, thank you for having me. It's great being with you. Father, as I said earlier, this is very fitting that a prodigal son coming back to the folds of the church, coming back to his father, is talking about mercy. So tell us what was the spark? What was what happened in your life that brought you back to the church? It was my business partner, you know, fell away, became agnostic and just sought the American dream, so to speak. I wanted worldly pleasures. I thought that's what would make me happy. And as I began to pursue those things, I was recruited out of college to go to work for a computer company. And during that time, I worked very closely with this group. It was a small group of about 17 people, and my boss invited me to do a startup company kind of that would spin out off of what we were already doing, something very different. And as we worked nights and weekends on this other project, he pulls me aside one day and he effectively says to me, professionally, I have no problem with you, Ken, but personally, I do. When we're with clients or customers and you see a Christian symbol, you make a Christian reference. But you've told me you don't believe in God, you don't pray, you don't go to church. And Ken, some of the stories you tell are unbecoming a man, let alone a Christian. I'm just curious, which is it? Yeah, he was a real friend. So my first conversion was the call to authenticity and integrity. My boss, Mike, is a devout Catholic. And not only did he challenge me to let my yes be yes and no be no, but he went one step further and invited me to come to church with him and his family, where I saw one of the most intelligent men I know kneeling before Jesus in the Eucharist. Then my other founding partner, Anton Weber, was a he's also, he wasn't Catholic at the time, but he was a very devout man and his silent witness to integrity and excellence, like was making these huge impacts in me. So these two men had this great impact in my life. Father, did you have to leave of friendships behind with people that were not as pleased with your return back to the Catholic faith? Or do you maintain all those relationships from something of your former life? Well, you know how it is. So I guess the what I have found in my own personal life is that the only friendships that really remain are the ones that have a rooted root in Christ somewhere. The further I go, it's not that I don't have friends who are not Christian or not Godly. I've got many like that currently. But but from the past, it was those things. But none of them abandoned me because I pursued faith. It was very interesting when I began to tell people I was considering the priesthood. It was my Catholic and Christian friends that were like, oh, that's good. My I used to rock climb. And so I had in rock climbing is a very granola group of crunchy and crunchy. And one, I remember two of them, one girl, Elijah, her boyfriend, Gary, agnostic, one was atheist. And I told him, I said, I think I'm going to be a priest. And they looked at me and they said, you're going to be a great priest. Well, they saw something. They saw a characteristic. They saw something in there that stood out to them that just innately they knew. And so I had tons of support from all sides. Yeah, that's interesting that call to authenticity, even across really just lines. People can tell when someone is truly following something with integrity. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So, Father, this book, this could seem like an odd pairing to some people that you have on one hand, spiritual warfare with its battles and weapons and strategies. And then on the other hand, you have this gentle mercy message from Saint Faustina and you put them together and you even say that divine mercy is a weapon for our times. So tell us about your aha moment of when you paired these two concepts. Um, so so I'm dyslexic in ADHD and I have tons of learning disabilities. One of my best friends here is not too far from the truth. He's a construction guy and he goes, he goes, well, it's official. Father has officially written more books than he read in college. So so there's a true statement in that. And so when I when I get into something, I because of the learning disabilities, I have to I have to focus in and really get into there and ask a lot of questions and and make a lot of mistakes. And and what I've learned is that my learning disabilities, the single greatest gift that God has given me because it is it's just so many different complexities to it. But but because of that, I've been able to see some things that I think a lot of people commonly miss. And, you know, specifically when you read the Divine Mercy Diary, you know, we talk about God's mercy as a platitude so often that God loves everybody, that God wants us all. And and he does, he does, but he is going to respect us all the way up until we take our last breath. And if we are constantly persisting to turn away from him, then the eternal damnation is what we have to look forward to. But but even in those last moments, there's so many different ways to describe this. But but God is not a pushover. God tolerates our sinfulness to bring us to conversion. And that's really the key of God's mercy. And so when we look at the message of Saint Faustina, it's not one page after another of Jesus saying, you know, it's OK, do what you want. I'm here. That's not the message. It's a constant call for conversion. And then for us to intercede on behalf of others in that we are at war and this divine mercy diary given to Faustina is loaded. I'm just touching on a handful of things, three or four things, but it is loaded with the ways to lead people back to the body of Christ. One father talking about just people in general as a whole. You make an analogy in the book that I love. You say every Christian is sailing on their ship towards heaven, towards their immortal home. But some people are on a cruise ship and other people are on a battle cruiser. And you need to be. You need to know which ship you are on. And so besides the open bar and the deck pool, won't you say are the differences in the people and the way they act on those two ships and which one should we be? Yeah, you make this great analogy from those early chapters when I'm talking about, you know, what is the church is often referred to as as a ship? And if we think of it as a cruiser liner, we have these expectations of being served and being catered to. But if it's a warship, every person on the warship has a job. So you're dealing with the passenger mentality versus a crew mentality. And and so having this notion that we each have a job to do. And that's our vocation in that if each of us does our vocation and lives our vocation directly and well, I don't have to have a big podcast. You don't have to write a book. You don't have to have a huge reach if you simply sanctify and nourish your family, your vocation, where you find yourself today, whether you're a single person, you live by yourself or you're a stay at home mom with a herd of kids or even just a couple of kids, right? If you sanctify that, you are going to change the world. You're going to save souls. And so if we all focused on doing our job and not worrying about what other people are doing, it makes things the whole lot easier. So true. Well, and I also father, I think when we talk about spiritual warfare, people have an intuition of thinking spiritual warfare. Oh, you know, St. Padre Pio or St. John Viani and the devil set his bed on fire or the exorcist, right? You think of these grand scenes of the devil being present, but you say the diabolical is much closer than that and that every Christian has a duty and an ability with these weapons to fight back against it in daily life, right? Correct. Absolutely. It's the, you know, they were set told that each and every person at the moment of our conception have a guardian angel assigned to us, but there's also a diabolic entity that's very interested in our demise as well. So we're not saying that there's a diabolic spirit, you know, assigned to us the way we have a guardian angel, but the devil's a pretenatural being who studies us, who knows us better than ourselves. He's, he's observed us our entire life, our entire history. And so he's constantly trying to set snares and traps for us. And we call these things temptations. And so just simple deliverance prayers like the, our father, we pray deliver us from evil. And I think we take for granted. We're so used to saying all of these things from muscle memory. We really take for granted the, the fecundity that the power that exists in that simple prayer when we say, Lord, deliver us from evil. And he gets right in there and starts delivering us. So yeah. Father, when people think of divine mercy, I think there's those three main prongs of it. There's the image, of course, that St. Faustina had commissioned. There is the feast day, the glorious feast after Easter. And then there's the divine mercy chaplet itself. And you go into each of these very deeply. But if you could, could you go through each one of those and tell us how, how does the image of divine mercy, how is that a weapon? How, how is the chaplet a weapon? So, so let's, let's do the, let's do image feast chaplet. So image, our Lord says, I'm giving mankind a vessel to which they are continue to come, which is the font of mercy. And so if I were going to ask any faithful Catholic, where do we find the font of mercy? We're going to point to Jesus in the Eucharist, right? Or the confessional, because that's the graces that Calvary flow from. But in the diary, our Lord says, I am giving mankind this vessel, which is this image with the signature, Jesus, I trust in you. And so what we can distill from that, that message is that from a blessed image of divine mercy, the rays that flow from Jesus in Eucharist come through that image. Now we call this in the church an icon, like you can see over my shoulder, there's an icon of the sacred heart of Jesus, right? A blessed image like that is a window to that reality in heaven. And the graces flow from heaven through that image, like a window, so to speak. So we're not saying that the image is the Eucharist, we're saying that the Eucharist of graces flow through that. And so you can use this as a weapon in your home, like I have this image here, those graces are flowing over us right now. You can give it to a family member or friend or someone who doesn't believe and put it in their home and allow those graces to flow in their home without them realizing it. And so nourishing them, protecting them, helping set the stage for their conversion. So that's the one element. Divine Mercy Sunday to me is so vitally important, it's so misunderstood in our church, because people say Divine Mercy Sunday, you can just get an indulgence on Divine Mercy Sunday. And that's not what the diary says. Paragraph 699 gives two conditions, and if you meet those two conditions, something happens to you. No one else this can't be transferred. So the first condition is have gone to confession which is about 20 days before or after Divine Mercy Sunday, and you receive Holy Communion in the state of grace. For the soul that has gone to confession and receives Holy Communion, they will be restored to their baptismal graces, their baptismal innocence. It's a return, it's the entire, entire annihilation of temporal punishment due to sin and all of your personal sin. It's as if you were just baptized in that moment. And so could you imagine if we, we embodied this message across the church and every priest on the planet sacrificed for days and months going into this to prepare his flock so that, that on Divine Mercy Sunday, every single member of their parish community was restored to their baptismal innocence. Huge. Yeah. Yeah. And we miss it. We miss it. Everyone's missing it. And not everyone. I mean, there's, listen, there's tons of the MICs. There's, there's great priests, but generically speaking, as a church, we're missing it universally. There are so many good priests out there, like, you know, saying what I'm saying. But it's, but it's pockets. Right. I don't think this isn't elevated or at least publicized to the level it should be. Is this its own spiritual warfare that the devil would prefer? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Possible. I like the, I use the word intoxication in many forms. There is chemical intoxication, right? Where you've consumed too much or use recreation drugs. There's emotional intoxication, right? Where we, we get caught up in the emotions inflamed. And then there's spiritual intoxication, right? There is this, the intoxication of the Holy Spirit, right? Where that's a beautiful thing. But there's also an intoxication of the vices, spiritual, we call it sloth or Acadia, where the spirit is so intoxicated on self and worldly things that we totally miss what's in front of us. And the fact that in 1917, Our Lady of Fatima made these promises and prophecies and warnings about upcoming world wars and things like that. And then 15 years later, one five, not five oh, one five years later, our Lord appears to Faustina and says, this is a message for the end times. So we're not John Paul, you know, he did a great job, but the church has been focused on a lot of other things lately. You say that in the book. That was a great page talking about Our Lady of Fatima and the warning, warning heading towards a cliff. And that you say, divine mercy is, you're there folks, you are there. And this is, this is the Hail Mary pass, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah, this is part of it. This is one, one big element of it. You know, our Lord told Faustina that she would prepare the world for his second coming. Now, I don't, you know, forget everything else. World wars, prophecies, forget. When Jesus says to someone, you're going to prepare the world for his second coming. You should get OCD. You should get a little OCD. I mean, you think about Moses, right? If you were a mom or a dad during the time of the Exodus, and you just had nine crazy plagues, and here comes number 10. And if you don't get it, everything right, your firstborn is dead. Yeah. I mean, and what if one of your kids is a finicky eater? He doesn't like eating lamb, right? Now I'm a middle child. So you, so you would be safe anyway. But yeah, listen, if I didn't like lamb, I would have eaten it till it came out of my ears that night. You know, as much as I would have tormented my brother, I think we all got past, this is a joking matter, five or six plagues into it, right? Well, once the river turned red, dude. Yeah, well, It's time to get on the board. Yeah, and we're missing it. We've got famine all over the United States. We've got famine across the world. We've got plagues. We've got manmade. We're at war. We're at, we're in the middle of World War III. We just, it's just not what it looks like traditionally. Right. You know, there's, there's all sorts of stuff going on in which brings us to these weapons of the chaplet. Father, I derailed you. I'm sorry. Go back to the chaplet. You make some claims in the book, which I think would be eye openings. People are daily rosary, rosary prayers of which I am one. You make a comparison of the rosary to the chaplet. And it's not a bad comparison. It's a, it's a difference of tools, I think. Tell us about the rosary compared to the chaplet. So the big thing that I focus in on is that so many people say the chaplet just for muscle memory. And this is great. You can have great meditations when you pray the chaplet, but, but when we pray the rosary, the rosary is a meditation on those 20 mysteries of the life of Christ. But the chaplet is an action. And we know it's an action from the fourth word we say when we pray the chaplet. So we pray, eternal Father, I offer. So, so in literally if, if folks, if, if this is the message, I want you to tell every single person you know about this because, because we just say it casually. You, you have to imagine yourself standing before God the Father, because that's who you're speaking to. And in your hands, see yourself extending up to him. Now, what are you offering him? The body, blood, soul and divinity, right? Where do we find that? That's the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the mass, mass is Calvary. So we're standing there. You can see yourself at the mass or see yourself at Calvary, uniting yourself with Jesus's perfect sacrifice, offering that to God the Father. And so, so this is the distinction between the rosary and the chaplet is that the chaplet is very much an action. You, you find yourself immersed in Jesus's perfect sacrifice. In atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. And then we pray 10 times for the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world. The only thing pleasing to the Father, you know, objectively speaking, theologically speaking. Wow. Father, if you have people that are picking up this book that are maybe learning about tools of spiritual warfare for the first time or learning about this connection of the two, what's their biggest takeaway that you hope they would gain from this book and take into their daily lives? I think it's that part two of the book. I mean, if you're only going to read anything, it's really dive into that divine mercy message because this is going to give you the practical tangible tools. Now, the first part of the book helps frame this because one of the big problems for a new person kind of entering into this who's not, doesn't have the sense of awareness is that that's the really key issue is that if we wake up every day thinking that the devil wants to destroy me he wants to lead me to sin. So if I'm vigilant thinking every day, not worrying about the devil, but how do I focus on doing the things of God today versus the things of the world? The devil is going to offer you good things and bad things where God wants to offer you the great things. And so if we just have this awareness of the different levels of temptations, oppression that can take place and the ways for us to just have a plan of prayer and things that help keep us steady on what we're supposed to do, it's really going to protect us. So I think that's the beauty of this book. I didn't realize what I was writing when I wrote it, but it's very much not only the what of spiritual warfare, but also practical how to live it out. And it's written very, again, I'm a dyslexic monkey. I don't get a lot of skills in that department. So it's written for the average person or probably just slightly below. I'm a mom of six. This is not Scott Hahn, right? Scott Hahn is not not in the house. So the book is really truly, I would agree, accessible to all levels and eminently readable in short chunks in a long stretch. You could knock this out in a weekend. You could savor it in adoration for four weeks if you wanted to. Fantastic book. Again, the book, spiritual warfare and divine mercy, the weapon for our times. You can find it right here at tanbooks.com or at your local Catholic bookseller. Father Jersey, would you give us your blessing before we end? Absolutely. Heavenly Father, we bless and thank and praise you. We ask you to bring this good work you've begun in each of us to fulfillment. And I bless you and your families in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Wonderful, Father. Thanks so much for being with us today. Thanks, Mary. God bless you. Have a great one.