From EWTN to St. Ignatius
By
Barbara Fitzgerald
Special to the CS&T
On Sunday nights, Kevin Flynn is behind a microphone strumming and singing,
but gone are the Irish tunes he sang with his brother’s band in
Texan pubs.
“Prepare the way of the Lord,” Flynn chants softly, while
a group of mostly teens takes up the collection at Mass. Flynn has traded
his mandolin for a guitar, and instead of landscaping lawns throughout
the suburbs of Dallas, he’s encouraging teens to grow in their
faith as the Youth Minister at St. Ignatius of Antioch parish in Yardley.
No one is more astonished than Flynn at his abrupt lifestyle change,
even though he was raised in a family whose Catholic music is widely
acclaimed. His father, Vinny Flynn, and his two sisters recorded the
“Still Waters” Divine Mercy Chaplet that is provided daily
on EWTN.
“I think I’m very much like the rest of my family, in that
the Lord has something He wants to do with me, and He’s not going
to leave me alone,” said the 26-year-old Flynn. “I never
wanted to be a youth minister. My family worked for the Church. It was
not in my plan at all — and He just changes your plans.”
Not only is Flynn involved in Catholic music, but his brothers have
also blazed trails in the field. Brian Flynn, a music director at St.
Mary’s church in Westphalia, Mich., has recorded two CDs that
feature an eclectic mix of styles. And John Flynn, who lives in Dallas,
just released his latest CD, “Cry Out.” It features sophisticated
background instrumentals that are not always found in praise-and-worship
fare.
John Flynn, 37, has also launched a new Catholic music service, www.CatholicSound.com,
which is geared to promoting new Catholic artists and offering parishes
music appropriate for young adult liturgies.
“My focus is on good Catholic music,” said John Flynn. “There’s
a lot of bad Catholic music out there. It’s difficult to get music
that relates to kids that is also good quality.”
John Flynn developed the Web site after looking for a similar service
on the internet and finding only a Protestant-based Web site. His site
lets Catholic worship leaders link their ideas, their music and their
needs. For a monthly fee, it also offers contemporary music for the
weekly responsorial psalms and seasonal Masses, as well as new Catholic
worship songs. It also features articles by worship leaders such as
Martin Doman.
John Flynn recently agreed to join his brother Kevin for a benefit concert
at St. Ignatius of Antioch, to raise money to send the youth group to
a summer retreat at Franciscan University in Stuebenville, Ohio.
For both brothers, it marks a dramatic reversal from where they once
stood with their faith.
“I’m a rock-and-roller who had a conversion,” John
Flynn said.
All of the Flynn siblings — John, Tim, Colleen, Brian, Erin, Kevin
and Mary — were raised Catholic in rural, western Massachusetts,
just minutes away from the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge,
where their father worked as executive editor at the Marian Helpers
Center. A teacher by training and Catholic since birth, Vinny began
his music ministry in the 1970s after becoming active in the Catholic
Charismatic renewal movement.
Vinny Flynn established a recording and publishing company, Spirit Song
Ministries, in 1993, to distribute the family’s music, talks and
religious publications. He now runs MercySong, Inc., which provides
talks and music ministry for retreats, men’s groups, youth rallies
and conferences.
Though he encouraged his sons’ love for music, he never consciously
tried to get them involved in music and ministry. And in fact, for a
while it seemed that none of his sons would follow him in that direction.
“But one by one, in their own way, they were touched by God —
and suddenly they’re all involved in music and ministry,”
Vinny Flynn said. “It’s not anything we planned, or tried
to make happen. God, in His timing, called them.”
Kevin and John Flynn recalled their rebellion before reverting back
to a rock solid practice of their faith.
“As we got older, we were all starting to kind of go our own ways,”
Kevin Flynn said. “Some of the kids were in the faith, and some
of them were not at all.”
As a teenager, he had traveled with his father and worked selling CDs.
One day, while he waited for his father to finish a talk, he saw a free
copy of the book “Pierced By A Sword,” and picked it up.
The Catholic novel, by Bud MacFarlane Jr., features a range of characters
and subplots that are interwoven with Marian apparitions.
The book changed Kevin Flynn’s life. Soon, everyone in the family
also was reading it. “It converted, or ‘reverted,’
half of us,” he said. “It really was like a starting point.”
He describes the process as a slow and painful one. Reading the book
was an important step, but so was the fact that he opened his heart
during a retreat. And it probably didn’t hurt that while he was
personally indecisive about his life, his father was praying and fasting
for Kevin Flynn.
“The whole time, my Dad is fasting for me and praying for me constantly,
I mean he knows what’s going on in my life,” Flynn said.
“He’s like that. My parents are the most selfless, sacrificial
people for their kids.”
As he strayed, Flynn said he felt he was being pursued by God.
“You have a mark on you,” he said. “When you’re
Catholic, and you’ve received the Eucharist, when you’ve
been confirmed, especially when you’ve opened up your heart a
little bit in a retreat setting or whatever, and you’ve let the
Lord touch your heart, you can’t run from it. Your going to do
everything you possibly can, and you can’t run from it.:
Catholics who leave the faith, he said, often are not truly happy: “Look
at their lives, look at the cloud that’s hanging over them. They
try to convince themselves that this tearing of the heart is other things.
They’re empty and broken. That’s what the brokeness is.
They know the mark of God. They’ve had a glimpse of God’s
love. … If you have a glimpse of that love, you’re never
going to find any other (greater) love anywhere, not a friend, not a
lover … nothing is going to fulfill that. I tried to cover it
up with all sorts of stuff, and tried to run from it and it’s
painful.”
Flynn’s decision to enter youth ministry resulted from a chain
of events. He promised his father he would accompany him on one last
conference before moving to Texas to start a landscaping business. At
the conference, he met musician Meredith Borger and was smitten. At
first, he backed away from introducing himself. But the next morning,
when he and his father got on the elevator, she was in the same car.
They exchanged addresses, and began a friendship.
Still, Kevin decided to go to Texas and put all he had into building
a landscaping business. Then, last summer, he learned there was a youth
minister position open at St. Ignatius, which is Borger’s parish.
The two joked about it, because it was something Kevin said he never
wanted to do.
But one day, while praying about it and driving around, he felt at peace
with the idea, he said. He sees it as just another step in preparation
for what the Lord will eventually call him to do. Currently, Borger
and he lead the music for the youth Mass each Sunday.
Asked who has been the most influential person in his life, he hesitated
only briefly. “Probably my father,” he said. “I’ve
followed in his footsteps. I think that more men do that than they realize
… .
“We all become our fathers anyway, more than we would want to
or not,” he said. His own father, he said, is “an awesome
man of God, and an awesome husband and father.”
Vinny Flynn said his source of strength is God the Father: “God
is essentially a Father, bestowing Himself, bestowing love. As a father,
my main job is to bestow love.
Further, Vinny Flynn said, “God is faithful to his fatherhood.”
He said parents should be a reflection of that unconditional love.
“Each of the kids came back [to the Catholic faith]. It wasn’t
because of any one thing, or smart thing we did. It is because God is
faithful,” Vinny Flynn said.
In fact, when Kevin Flynn describes his father, he could easily be describing
God’s covenant with mankind.
“He loves his kids,” Flynn said. “If there’s
anything I can learn from him, it’s that he loves his family.”
Barbara Fitzgerald is a freelance writer and a parishioner of St.
Ignatius in Yardley. She can be reached at babsfitz@earthlink.net.