Bud Macfarlane
Episode 326
28 APR 2025
He was captain of his varsity football, basketball, and baseball teams and received multiple scholar-athlete awards, being mildly recruited by small private colleges and Ivy League schools in various sports. More specifically, he was a standout defensive catcher on a championship team and an all-conference defensive end. In basketball, he was one of the best defensive players in the state. In addition, he was a high school track and field coach and coached baseball in town leagues for many years. He is a best-selling novelist and the founder of The Mary Foundation, which he created more than 33 years ago. Their apostolate has influenced tens of millions of people through their website, novels, and other Catholic resources. In 2020 he and a priest “pinned” the Mantle of Mary on the extreme four corners of the U.S., and later, over an eight-month period, he led a spiritual warfare initiative requiring extraordinary physical challenges, which he talks about during this interview.
Notable guest quotes:
“I myself from the beginning of when I can remember have always had a deep interior belief in everything the Catholic church teaches as it teaches it. And even the things I did know when I discovered them, it felt like I already believed them or knew them.”
“I had this sort of, one of those moments in your life where everything changes, where I thought I’m not here to play sports. I’m here to study. God brought me here for a different reason.”
“As I often do, as the saints teach, it was kind of a little dialogue with God, just a conversation with Him on the way there. But I felt his force, let’s say, stopping me.”
“I wanted to get a rifle and go somewhere and start shooting bad guys. But I also had this inkling, maybe God wants me to be a priest.”
“I received a couple of spiritual cures while I was in the seminary… I’m very grateful for my time in the seminary. I learned a lot there.”
“It’s like a change in your state of being. And by making this total consecration, everything in your life, whether you sleep, whether you sin, whether you repent, whatever you do, it’s done in the service of her guiding you to Jesus’s perfect will.”
“You have to reject the heresy that you can’t become a saint.”
“Father Boughton had called me up and said the bishops are going to do a Eucharist pilgrimage across the United States. And between the two of us we lobbied the bishop in charge to do it in the form of the crucifix, which they did and completed in July of 2024 with the Eucharistic Congress. That’s never been done in any country.”
“(the Blessed Mother) asked people to become saints, to pray the rosary with a sacramental life; in short, to love God and to love with all your heart and love everyone else and love yourself even.”
“There have been more Christian martyrs in the last 20 years than in the whole history of the world that’s happening in places we can’t see… right now.”
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