Tom Allen became a lifelong Mets fan when he was growing up in New City, but couldn't help feeling torn — maybe even a bit gleeful — when the St. Louis Cardinals dispatched his team in the playoffs last fall and then won the World Series.
You have to understand, Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan was named most valuable player of the National League Championship Series against the Mets. Then David Eckstein earned the MVP trophy in the Series.
Both are devout Roman Catholics.
Allen had already interviewed them about their faith for a film about Catholic baseball stars. Now he had a dream storyline.
Providential, some might say.
"They were the only two Mass-attending Catholics on the Cardinals," he said, still sounding knocked over by his good fortune. "I mean, come on."
The Faith in High Definition
That's how things have been going for Allen, a 44-year-old mini-mogul of Catholic media. He is at the forefront of a new kind of Catholic evangelism that preaches in high definition and aims to entertain as it explains.
His often stirring baseball film, Champions of Faith, is getting great buzz across the Catholic world and was recently seen by more than 70 bishops wearing civvies and chomping popcorn.
If it sells, a sequel featuring Yankees and Red Sox — possibly together at Mass! — could be on the way, along with a football version.
Allen also oversees one of the Web's top Catholic sites, publishes books on hot-button cultural issues, and is steering two big-time movie projects with Christian themes.
And he played a major, behind-the-scenes role in the unexpected success of Mel Gibson's Passion of The Christ. He raised millions to distribute the film nationally after Hollywood wanted nothing to do with the controversial epic.
"I have attended Mass and prayed the Rosary with Mel, and he is a man of genuine faith," Allen said. "I've gotten a lot of questions about Mel. My response is to judge the movie by what's on the screen. It is a godly movie."
Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the Archdiocese of New York, said Allen understands that the Catholic media must have the same production standards as the mainstream media if they are going to reach their potential audience.
Living Out the Faith
"I especially love 'Champions of Faith,' which can appeal to anyone," said Zwilling, a big Mets fan who consulted with Allen as he drew up plans for the entertaining Catholic Channel on SIRIUS Satellite Radio. "I don't think the point is for people to watch it and say, 'I'm going to change my life,' although that would be great. But it shows that you can be Catholic and live out your faith, for instance, in the world of professional baseball. Tom really gets it."
Allen lives with his wife, Sue, and their four children in Oceanside, Calif., but he stopped by St. Augustine's Church in New City last week during a visit to New York. It was his boyhood parish and where he went to elementary school before attending Clarkstown South High School.
Allen said he believes it is his vocation to reach undereducated, misinformed or simply confused Catholics with state-of-the-art media.
"There is a lot of holy, pious Catholic media that gets produced for people who are already grounded in the faith," he said. "My goal as a Catholic communicator is to create media that crosses over into the mainstream Catholic community, where millions of people raised Catholic don't really know the faith they inherited."
He was once one of them.
Allen was raised with three siblings in a faithful Catholic family. But he started school at St. Augustine's in 1968, just as the effects of the Second Vatican Council — liberating and bewildering — could be felt in parishes.
Nuns started showing up without habits. Some left their convents. Allen's first-grade teacher went a step further, marrying a former parish priest who discarded his collar.
The way Allen sees it, he went off to Notre Dame University having seen a lot of change, but without a real grounding in the faith.
"I didn't have a sufficiently strong foundation to weather going away to college and everything it brings," he said. "I didn't understand the context of the rules of Catholicism."
He stopped going to Mass and pursued an interest in film, first studying film production at NYU and then taking a job with Movie Maker magazine in Seattle in 1993. There he interviewed celebrities like Jodie Foster and Oliver Stone, but the whole thing seemed unsatisfying.
Then their first child, Tom IV, was born, and the Allens faced a turning point question: Would they baptize him? So Allen started studying Catholicism as if he wasn't born into it — reading about the saints, watching Catholic TV, reading the Bible in a serious way for the first time. Then he moved on to Catholic Charities and began running a 225-mat homeless shelter.
"It all came together for me," he said. "This is the faith I inherited, the faith I underappreciated in my 20s, the faith I'm grounded in today."
As he moved into his mid-30s, he began to develop a vision of what he wanted to do: use his passion for film and media to promote that faith. In 2000, he moved to CatholicExchange.com, a Yahoo-style, multiple-service Catholic portal that offers everything from news and movie reviews to daily Scripture readings and homilies. Today, he's president and editor in chief.
He was a producer for Relevant Radio, a network of Catholic radio stations, and has published or co-written books about The Passion, Narnia and The Da Vinci Code.
A friend helped him get a meeting with Gibson in 2003, at which he learned that The Passion"could be derailed by poor distribution. Allen and his friend volunteered for duty.
"I know a lot of rich Catholics from raising money for Catholic Exchange," he said.
The amount raised was in the eight figures. Gibson's movie took off.
"Tom was always very intense," said his father, Tom Allen Jr., whose wife, Eileen, died two years ago. "So few guys his age want to promote their faith. With all the nonsense going on — the devil seems to be working overtime — I think it's great, especially Champions of Faith."
Will Catholics Support Catholic Media?
Thanks to a colleague with connections in the sports world, Allen started his baseball project in 2004, not knowing what to expect. But they found more than a dozen players and coaches happy to talk about their Catholicism. And they stumbled onto a few really dramatic stories.
Mike Sweeney of the Kansas City Royals was haunted by a brutal fight he had in 2001 with pitcher Jeff Weaver. He wound up apologizing to Weaver and weeping over the experience.
Former Met star Mike Piazza talked about hitting the game-winning home run in the first New York City sporting event after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Dodgers coach Rich Donnelly shared his return to faith after the death of his 17-year-old daughter.
"One of my goals was to restore the American sports hero to his proper place in the culture," Allen said.
Keith Furey, a lifelong friend of Allen's from New City, said that Allen is probably just beginning to make his mark.
"Tom always had one foot in the literary world, but didn't know where he wanted to go," he said. "Then it crystallized for him. He found this niche to get a religious message across to the youth of today."
For now, Allen is working on an animated telling of Henry Van Dyke's story The Fourth Wise Man and a feature film about a saintly guy who fought gang violence in Chicago.
But the big question is whether Champions of Faith will sell.
The DVD is available on Amazon.com and other Web sites and should be in retail stores in the fall. But the vast Catholic community does not have a track record of supporting Catholic projects the way evangelical Christians support their booming media enterprises.
"Catholics are very mainstream Americans," Allen said. "Protestants know they have to support their filmmakers and authors. Catholics have to do the same thing."
[CE editor's note: Tom Allen has served as Editor and President of CE since our founding in 2001.
To order your copies of Champions of Faith click here or call 877-263-1263.]
