The Mission

The Calling

I was not in a church. I was standing at the sink, brushing my teeth on an ordinary night, when it came through me. Not a thought I reached for, but something given, and it carried an anger that was not mine.

Two charges, plain and hard.

Protect my mother.

Bring the people back to my church.

The anger in it was the anger of the temple. The one day we are shown the Lord furious, when He made a whip of cords and overturned the tables and drove out what did not belong in His Father’s house. That was the heat this came in. Not sadness. Not a suggestion. The zeal of a Son whose mother is being treated with contempt. I have not been able to set it down since, and I do not believe I am meant to.

I think of a day when I was a boy. Someone said something cruel about my mother, and I watched her try to swallow it. She did not let it out. She went quiet, and a few tears came up under her breath, and she fought to keep them from falling in front of me. I was small and I could not do much, but I have never forgotten how it lit me up inside, how every part of me wanted to put myself between her and the person who put those tears there.

That rising is not a sin. It is love with its spine showing. Love does not stay seated while the one it loves is wounded. It rises, every time, and the only question it is ever asked is where to aim what rises in it. And it is the closest I can come to naming what this is. The Mother of God is being spoken of with contempt, by the world and from pulpits, and in the language of our faith she has wept over it. She wept at La Salette. She weeps still in the weeping icons, the images that stream tears and myrrh to this day. Her Son saw my mother’s tears on that long-ago afternoon, and He sees His own mother’s now, and He has asked us to stand between her and the ones who cause them.

The Battle for Your Soul

Step back and see what is really happening, because it is bigger than movies and bigger than bad sermons.

There is a war on, and it is not the one you can see. The angels and the demons are not fighting each other with swords. They cannot kill one another. So what is the battle for? It is for you. For your soul. The enemy and the ones who serve him have one aim, to deceive you into sin, because your sin is how he tries to take your soul from God. That is the whole game. The scorecard is not money, not territory, not applause. The scorecard is souls.

And understand what your soul is worth. It is worth so much that God Himself became a man and went to a cross and died, to buy it back. What doth it profit a man, the Lord said, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul. There is no trade that makes that worth it. Your soul is the thing of infinite value, and there is an enemy who wants it, and he does not fight fair.

This is why they put the corruption in front of the children. Why the things that lead the young into sin are dressed up as harmless and wheeled into the schools. The point is to make sin look like nothing. To raise a generation that has never once been told that sin is real, so that by the time they are grown they can no longer even hear the word. Make a child believe that nothing is a sin, and you have disarmed him for life. That is not confusion. That is strategy.

And understand why he must work by deception at all. He cannot seize a single soul by force. God gave you a free will, and that free will is the one thing in all creation that is truly yours to give. So the enemy’s only move is to trick you into handing it over yourself, one small surrender at a time.

“It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should scandalize one of these little ones.”

— Luke 17:2

And there is still time. If you have used a voice, a platform, any influence at all to move people toward sin, that same reach can be turned around. Repent, come home, and use it now to move them toward God. The more people you led in the wrong direction, the more good is waiting to be done leading them back. Start with your own soul, and then go back for theirs.

The Reckoning

Because a day is coming for every one of us. We will stand in front of God and look at Him in the face. And He will not ask how successful you were, or how comfortable, or whether the culture approved of you. The Lord said it plainly: if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. So the question will be simple. I gave you my commandments. Did you keep them.

It is by His grace that anyone keeps them at all, and when we fall, the door of His mercy is never locked, which is the whole reason confession exists. But to spend a life calling His commandments optional, to be told a hundred times that sin is not sin and to believe it, and to die having refused the mercy that was held out the entire time, is to choose the one thing God will not drag you out of. It is to lose Him forever. Heaven is real. Hell is real. The choice between them is real, and it is being made right now, in the small yeses and noes of an ordinary life.

Everything we do here is meant to help a soul be ready to answer that question well, and to reach for the mercy while there is still time.

You Already Know

Here is the part no one can argue you out of. You do not need a theologian to tell you that some things are wrong. You feel it. When a drag show is brought into your child’s grammar school, when pride flags are raised over children far too young to understand any of it, something in you recoils. That recoil is not hate. It is conscience, the law of God written on the human heart, and it is doing its job. You already know. So stop putting your head in the sand.

Now hear the other half, the half they rarely tell you. The commandments are not a cage. They are the best life there is. I will not pretend they are easy, because they are not. But a life lived inside them is a life that runs clean. You feel whole. You feel holy. Things settle into place.

And do not be fooled by the easy version of religion, the one that says you need only pick a day, say the words, I believe, accept Him as your Lord and Savior, and you are saved and nothing more is ever asked of you. That is not what Christ said. He said, if you love me, keep my commandments. Faith is not one sentence spoken once. It is a whole life made congruent with the words, shaped to look like Christ, by His grace and one choice at a time.

And because we all fall, every one of us, He left us a place to be put right. You go to confession. You say it honestly. And you resolve, you truly resolve, to fight not to do it again. That resolve is the whole key, and it is exactly where so many are lost. They think choosing Christ once was the finish line, so they never turn and fight the sin, never go and confess it, and they stay chained to the very thing dragging them under, telling themselves the entire time that they are already saved. That is not faith. That is an excuse wearing faith’s clothes.

Now hear the most freeing thing in all of it. There is only one sin God will not forgive, and it is not the one you are afraid of. Everything else, every single thing you have ever done, He is standing ready to wash clean. Come back, and see what you have been missing.

The One Church

There is one Church that Jesus Christ founded, and into it He poured the fullness of what He came to give. Not a portion of it. The whole of it. The sacraments He left with His own hands. The Body and Blood of the Lord in the Eucharist, truly present, not a symbol and not a memory. The mercy of confession, where a person can lay down every sin he has ever carried and walk out of that room clean.

Do not take my word for any of it. Take out your phone and ask it. Ask who founded the Lutheran church, and you will be given a man, Martin Luther, and a year. Ask who founded the Methodists, and you will get a man. The Baptists, a man. The Anglican church, a king who wanted a divorce. Every one of them traces back to a person, a place, and a date somewhere in the last few hundred years.

Then ask who founded the Catholic Church. The answer runs back two thousand years, to a carpenter from Nazareth who was God, and to a fisherman He renamed Peter, to whom He said, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. From that fisherman there runs an unbroken line of successors, one laying hands on the next, all the way down to the man who sits in Peter’s place today. Every other church was founded by a man. Only the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ Himself. That is not an opinion you have to take on faith. It is a thing you can look up in sixty seconds, and it is why we make our claim without apology.

Our Work

Two charges were given, so we have two tasks.

How We Fight

Make no mistake about how serious this is. The zeal is real, the same zeal that turned over the tables in the temple. But our weapons are not the world’s weapons. We drag no one out of his house. We throw open the doors of our Father’s house, and we stand in the doorway, and we call people in. We fight with truth, with reverence, with prayer, with reparation for the insults thrown at her, and with the open door of mercy that is always, always unlocked. The anger this began in becomes, in us, intercession. That is the only honest place for it to go.

To the Pastor Reading This

And if you are a pastor, and you have read this far, then somewhere in you, you already know. You know it is right. You felt it when you read about His mother, because you preach about her Son every Sunday of your life, and a part of you has always sensed that you cannot love the Son the way you do and go on letting His mother be spoken of the way some speak of her.

So sit with this for one moment. If a man spoke about your own mother the way the world, and too many pulpits, speak about His — you would not let it pass. You would stand up. You would say something. You would put yourself between her and the person causing the harm. That is not a Catholic instinct. That is a human one. And it is the same instinct He is asking you to bring to His.

You do not have to become Catholic today. You do not have to agree with everything on this site. But you can stop. You can stop the contempt. You can speak of her with the dignity you would give any mother. That is where it begins, and it costs nothing but the willingness to let love lead where it is already trying to go. We are not your enemies. We are praying for you. And the door is open.

My name is Thomas Roman. I am not a priest or a theologian. I am a husband, a father, and a son of the Church who could not shake the call to protect his mother and bring her children home. This site is my answer to it. If it has stirred something in you, that is not me. That is her Son, reaching you through her.

This work does not belong to me alone. My wife, Jessica, came to the Catholic Church as an adult. She encountered the Eucharistic miracles, was convicted that the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by Christ, and said yes, and she is being received into full communion now. I am a cradle Catholic, she is a convert, and we found in each other and in the Church the very thing we most want for you.

Our mission as a couple is simple. To bring people to Jesus Christ through the Catholic Church He founded. That is the whole of it.

Thomas and Jessica Roman, ProtectMary.com

Come Home

Everything we do here is meant to help a soul be ready to answer that question well, and to reach for the mercy while there is still time.