Father Burke Masters speaks to Veronica Dudo on "EWTN News Nightly" on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025 / Credit: EWTN News
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 25, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Father Burke Masters’ first dream was to be a major league baseball player, but after feeling a call from God to the priesthood he now uses the sport “to speak about Jesus and the Church.”
“I played college baseball at Mississippi State University, and then played briefly in the minor leagues,” Masters said. “That was my dream to be a major league baseball player, but that didn’t work out.”
“God eventually called me to be a priest,” Masters said in an Oct. 24 interview with “EWTN News Nightly.” He added: “It really wasn’t what I wanted, but it was this persistent and gentle call from the Lord.”
“I went to seminary fully thinking I would go … not like it, and then go back to my plans,” Masters said. “Yet when I got to seminary I just felt this overwhelming peace, and that’s one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.”
Masters was ordained in 2002, serving as priest in Illinois. Eventually though, baseball did become a part of his career when he was named the chaplain of the Chicago Cubs in 2013.
“God brought baseball back into my life in a way that I never expected,” Masters said. “Since then, people have called me the ‘baseball priest,’ because I love to connect faith with sports.”
While Masters’ “full-time job” was as a pastor in the Diocese of Joliet, he attended all the Cubs’ home games. As the “baseball priest,” Masters was chaplain when they won the World Series in 2016.
“One of my big messages to the players then and to the players now would be: ‘Just remember your identity, you’re beloved sons of God. Your identity is not in the sport of baseball.’ And what I find that helps players … relax to say: ‘Yes, this is a big game. Millions of people are watching, but in the end, it’s still just a game. And life goes on,’” he said.
Connecting faith and sports
In 2023, Masters published a book, “A Grand Slam for God: A Journey from Baseball Star to Catholic Priest.” He wrote about his childhood outside of Chicago, his success in baseball, his conversion to Catholicism, and his acceptance of his vocation.
His story discusses his doubts and personal loss, and how he learned to embrace his identity not as an athlete but as a son of God and spiritual leader.
“Baseball taught me a lot of things, among them, discipline, hard work, and how to work with people of a lot of different backgrounds,” Masters said. “I find that to be so helpful in my life as a priest, as a vocation director, as a pastor, that I try to invest a lot of time in my spiritual life.”
“Also, baseball has given me a way to … reach people who are not close to God at the moment by bringing stories about baseball and my sports background,” Masters said. “It gives me an opening to speak about Jesus and the Church. It’s just been a great gift.”
In homilies, Masters said he will “bring up the sport of baseball.” He added: “I can see some of the people who love the sport perk up and then can bring the Gospel message to them more easily.”
Ahead of the 2025 World Series on Oct. 24, Masters shared with EWTN his predictions for the outcome. He said: “If I go off my head, the Dodgers will win, but I love pulling for the underdog. So my heart is going with the Toronto Blue Jays.”
A commuter waits at the Westchester/Veterans Metro K Line station on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025, in Los Angeles. / Credit: Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 21, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
A controversial ad campaign posted in the New York City subway system has sparked criticism and vandalism over the past few weeks. The print ads are selling an AI companion necklace called “Friend” that promises to be “someone who listens, responds, and supports.”
The device first launched in 2024, retailing at $129. It is designed to listen to conversations, process the information, and send responses to the user’s phone via a connected app. While users can tap the disc’s button to prompt an immediate response, the product will also send unprompted texts. The device’s microphones don’t offer an off switch, so it is constantly listening and sending messages based on conversations it picks up.
CNA did not receive a response to a question from Friend.com about the success of its subway ad campaign and how many people are currently using the devices, but Sister Nancy Usselmann, FSP, director of the Daughters of St. Paul’s Pauline Media Studies who also studies AI, told CNA that “people are turning to AI for companionship because they find human relationships too complicated.”
But “without that complicatedness, we cannot grow to become the best that we can be. We remain stagnant or selfish, which is a miserable existence,” she said.
Creating ‘Friend’ amid loneliness epidemic
Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old who started Friend.com, was a Harvard student before leaving school to focus on a number of projects. At 18, he created a website that tracked early COVID-19 data from Chinese health department sources. In 2022, he built another website that matched Ukrainian refugees with hosts around the world to help them find places to stay. He then founded Friend and now serves as the company’s CEO.
Schiffmann and his company first turned heads when an eerie video announcing the new gadget was released in July 2024. The advertisement featured four different individuals interacting with their “friends.” One woman takes a hike with her pendant, while another watches a movie with hers. A man gets a text from his “friend” while playing video games with his human friends. He first appears to be sad and lonely around his friends, until his AI “friend” texts him, which appears to put him at ease.
The marketing video ends with a young man and woman spending time together as the woman discusses how she has only ever brought “her” to where they are hanging out, referencing her AI gadget.
“It’s so strange because it’s awkward to have an AI in between a human friendship,” Usselmann said about the video ad.
Hundreds took to the comments section of the YouTube videoto respond — mostly negatively — to both the Friend.com ads and the technology. Commentators called out the company for capitalizing on loneliness and depression. One user even called the video “the most dystopian advertisement” he had ever seen, and others wrote the video felt like a “horror film.”
“While its creators might have good intentions to bring more people the joys of companionship, they are misguided in trying to achieve this through a digital simulacrum,” Father Michael Baggot, LC, professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome, told CNA.
The device “suffers from a misnomer, since authentic friendship involves an interpersonal relationship of mutual support,” said Baggot, who studies AI chatbots and works on the development of the Catholic AI platform Magisterium AI.
“The product risks both worsening the loneliness epidemic by isolating users from others and undermining genuine solitude by intruding on quiet moments with constant notifications and surveillance. Friend commodities connection and may exploit human emotional vulnerabilities for profit,” he said, adding: “It might encourage users to avoid the challenging task of building real relationships with people and encourage them to settle for the easily controllable substitute.”
Usselmann agreed. “Only by reaching out in genuine compassion and care can another person who feels lonely realize that they matter to someone else,” she said. “We need to get to know our neighbors and not remain so self-centered in our apartments, neighborhoods, communities, or places of work.”
AI device ad campaign causes stir
In a post to social media platform X on Sept. 25, Schiffmann announced the launch of the subway ad campaign. The post has more than 25 million views and nearly 1,000 comments criticizing the pendant and campaign — and some commending them.
Dozens of the ads have since been torn up and written on. People have posted images to social media of the vandalized ads with messages about the surveillance dangers and the general threats of chatbots. One urged the company to “stop profiting off of loneliness,” while another had “AI is not your friend” written on it.
One person added to the definition of “friend,” writing it is also a “living being.” It also had the message: “Don’t use AI to cure your loneliness. Reach out into the world!”
Usselmann said the particular issue with the campaign and device is “the tech world assuming certain words and giving them different connotations.”
“A ‘friend’ is someone with whom you have a bond based on mutual affection,” she said. “A machine does not have real affection because it cannot love. It does not have a spiritual soul from which intellect, moral agency, and love stem.”
She continued: “And from a Christian understanding, a friend is someone who exhibits sacrificial love, who supports through the ups and downs of life, and who offers spiritual encouragement and forgiveness. An AI ‘friend’ can do none of those things.”
Boys swing on a rope during recess at Western Academy in Houston, Texas. / Credit: Courtesy of Western Academy
Houston, Texas, Oct 4, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
After years of boys (and their parents) repeatedly ignoring the rules, a private boys school in Houston is taking a novel approach to its smartphone and digital device policy: Bring it to school, and “we will destroy it.”
In the past, if a boy was caught with a phone or other device at the school or a school-sponsored event, faculty would confiscate the device, which would be returned to the parents only after they had met with headmaster Jason Hebert. He would explain the harms to boys caused by smartphone use and why parents “should not put the phone back into your son’s hands.”
Boys look for toads in a pond during recess. Credit: Courtesy of Western Academy
Under the new policy, which Hebert laid out in a four-page letter to parents last month, after the device is discovered and destroyed, the boy will be suspended. If it happens again, the boy will be automatically expelled.
Along with its singular smartphone policy, the school, which has 230 students in third through eighth grade, takes a unique approach to education. The boys are free to play throughout the park-like, rambling grounds, where they climb and swing from trees, build forts, shoot Nerf guns, and care for (or chase) chickens before and after school and multiple times throughout the school day.
The all-male faculty expects respect and responsibility from the boys at a young age, according to Hebert. The teachers have the boys rise when an adult visits a classroom and encourage parents to let their sons learn to endure hardship and experience natural consequences when they forget their homework or their lunch at home.
Jason Hebert, headmaster at Western Academy in Houston. Credit: Courtesy of Western Academy
A Catholic priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei serves as chaplain to the school, which was founded in 2010, and oversees the religious education program.
The model is popular: Even with middle-school tuition close to $28,000 a year, every grade has extensive waitlists, and the school may start wait-listing boys beginning as early as kindergarten.
At the beginning of each school year, the boys are sorted into one of four houses that compete throughout the year in games such as capture the flag and “The Hero’s Race,” where the boys in each house choose one boy to race across campus, climbing over obstacles and crawling through mud. There is also a poetry recitation competition known as “The Bard.” One mother, Stephanie Creech, told CNA her sons are so happy at the school they “beg to get to school early and to stay afterward to play.”
Hebert sat down with CNA and discussed what brought about the change in the smartphone policy, saying he chose the words in his letter very carefully.
Hebert speaks to the boys on the first day of school as the faculty looks on. Credit: Courtesy of Western Academy
Witnessing the damage
“Smartphones are causing significant, unimagined damage to the students who have them,” Hebert wrote in his letter to parents, “as well as to the sons of those parents who have chosen not to give phones to their sons.”
“The damage these phones have caused to our children,” he told CNA in the interview, “it literally has never been imagined.”
“It’s not just pornography,” Hebert continued. “YouTube actors and other characters just trying to get clicks perform the most shameless actions on video. They just have zero respect for the dignity of their bodies and for life, zero. And these boys want to emulate these people.”
Hebert said the last straw came after a mother called him complaining her son saw a graphic, violent video on a smartphone at a school event.
After that, Hebert said he and the other administrators agreed: “That’s it. We’re done.”
Asked why the school did not just consider automatic expulsion after the first offense rather than the destruction of the devices, Hebert said with a laugh: “To be perfectly candid, I want to destroy the phone. I want to give the boys an opportunity to have life without it.”
He ordered a metal grinder for the purpose.
“Look, I am not an alarmist. I am not reactionary. But the bottom line is this: These devices are not neutral. The research is definitive: They are bad for our kids. I have dealt with hundreds and hundreds of boys over two decades in education and I have yet to see an exception to this,” he said.
Hebert said that over the years, he has noticed a degradation in the quality of the boys’ conversation. “You can’t imagine the level of shamelessness” among some of the boys,” many of whom are generally considered “good kids.”
“This type of behavior is unprecedented in my tenure as an educator, and even as a professional athlete,” he said.
Boys cheer their teammates on as the houses compete in a game of “Thud,” in which two boys throw a medicine ball at one another as hard as they can until one of them drops it or gives up. Credit: Courtesy of Western Academy
In the early 2000s, before beginning his teaching career, which included teaching at The Heights School in Maryland, he spent one year as a professional football player on practice squads for three NFL teams: the Chargers, the Titans, and the Raiders.
“I never played in a regular-season game. This is what I tell people: I made it to the NFL. I did not make it in the NFL,” he said, laughing.
“Let me make it clear: I was an athlete around some of the most earthy human beings on the planet,” he said. “These men were not ashamed to say anything in the locker room. Yet these same men would have blushed if they heard some of the things these boys talk about! This is so unimaginable. Yet it is becoming more common now, thanks to these devices.”
Parents on board
Asked if he was worried parents would leave over the school’s new policy, Hebert said if parents are not on board with the school’s values, it might be better if they left and one of the many others on the waitlist could take their spot.
In his letter to parents, Hebert wrote that the “school is a true partnership with parents. We say this not for poetic effect, but because it must be so for the authentic growth of your sons to become a reality.”
He told CNA parents should ask themselves: “How valuable is the phone to you? Are you willing to leave this place for it? This place where your son is so abundantly happy? Is your phone worth that? And if it is, well, it’s a mismatch of vision.”
Since the change in policy, however, Hebert said parental response has been “100% positive.”
After hearing about the school’s new policy, a mother whose son graduated from the school several years ago dropped off a financial donation at the front desk recently “for the phone grinder.”
“Everybody just knows it’s right. Parents might be frustrated because saying no to their sons makes their lives harder, but they know it’s right,” he said.
Hebert, a father of seven, said he and his wife do not allow their children to have smartphones or social media. “My children may not know a lot of the lingo or some of the jokes or about all the parties. They’re on the outside, to a degree.”
“And even though that’s a big deal,” he continued, “the alternative overrides that. It’s a bigger deal.”
“The alternative is not worth it,” he said.
“We all want the truth,” he said, “and the truth is these devices are severely hurting kids. I’m not a doomsday guy, but some day these kids will be in charge of society. Think about that.”
President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission meets on Sept. 29, 2025, in Washington, D.C. / Credit: Tessa Gervasini/CNA
Washington, D.C., Sep 29, 2025 / 19:13 pm (CNA).
Teachers, coaches, and other public and private school leaders said their religious liberty was threatened in American schools at a hearing conducted by President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission on Sept. 29.
Speakers said there must be a fight for schools to bring back the “truth” to protect students and religious liberty. Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach; Monica Gill, a high school teacher; Marisol Arroyo-Castro, a seventh grade teacher; and Keisha Russell, a lawyer for First Liberty Institute, addressed the commission led by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
“There has to be a call to action,” commission member Dr. Phil McGraw said. “The most common way to lose power is to think you don’t have it to begin with. We do have power, and we need to rally with that power.”
Teachers and coaches describe experiences
Kennedy said he was suspended — and later fired — from his position as a football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington for praying a brief and quiet prayer after football games.
“After the game, I took a knee to say thanks,” Kennedy explained. “That’s all. If that could be turned into a national controversy, it says more about the confusion in our country than the conduct of the person performing it.”
Kennedy told the commission the law is “cloudy and muddy” and they “have the power to clarify it.” Kennedy also said some lawyers “need to be held accountable” for actions taken in religious liberty cases.
Kennedy said: “I don’t know a lot about law and liberty, but I know that you’re supposed to advise people on the truth and the facts, and they’re not. They have an agenda, and their agenda is well set and in place and is working very well, keeping prayer out of the public square. They’re still doing it. That needs to be exposed.”
“Being a teacher has been one of the greatest blessings of my life,” Gill said to the committee. “God really gave my heart a mission … to show all of my students every day that they are loved. No matter what they’re going through, no matter what their grades are, no matter what their status is with their peers, I love them.”
“But in the summer of 2021 … Loudoun County Public Schools adopted a policy that forced teachers to deny the foundational truth of what it means to be human, created as male and female,” Gill said.
“This policy forced teachers to affirm all transgender students,” Gill said. “My employer gave teachers a choice: deny truth or risk everything … I knew that I could not stand in front of my Father in heaven one day and say: ‘My pension plan was more important than your truth.’ I also knew that if I say that I love my students, the only right choice would be to stand in love and truth for them.”
To combat the policy, Gill joined a lawsuit by Alliance Defending Freedom after a fellow Virginia teacher was fired for speaking out against the same policy. The lawsuit “resulted in victory for all teachers to freely speak truth and love when Loudoun County finally agreed not to require teachers to use pronouns in accordance with the student’s sex,” Gill said.
Arroyo-Castro testified that she was punished for displaying a cross in her private workspace in her seventh grade classroom in a New Britain School District school in Connecticut.
“I share this with you to help you understand why the crucifix is so significant to me and why I will never hide it from anyone’s view,” Arroyo-Castro said. “The vice principal told me that the crucifix was of a religious nature, so against the Constitution of the United States, and that it had to be taken down by the end of the day.”
If she did not take it down it would be considered “insubordination and could lead to termination,” Arroyo-Castro said. She asked if she could have time to pray on it, and was told she could, but “it wouldn’t change anything.”
“I was later called to a meeting with the district chief of staff, the principal, the vice principal, [and a] union representative. The chief of staff suggested that I put the crucifix in a drawer. I knew I couldn’t do that since my grandmother has instilled in me the meaning of the crucifix and how it should be treated with respect. But the chief of staff said that the Constitution says that I had to take it down,” Arroyo-Castro said.
After she refused to remove it, Arroyo-Castro was released from school with an unpaid suspension. She was offered legal defense by lawyers at First Liberty, which sued the school for violating the Constitution. While the lawsuit is ongoing she works in the administrative building “far from the students.”
Arroyo-Castro said: “Every day, I wonder how they’re doing.”
“Please do what you can to educate the districts in American schools about the true meaning of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause,” Arroyo-Castro advised the commission members. “How can we do our jobs well when many education leaders today don’t understand the Constitution themselves? We must understand as Americans that freedom of religion is a right that benefits all Americans.”
Suggestions from faith leaders
Leaders at Jewish, Catholic, and Christian schools also recounted religious freedom issues facing faith-based schools across the nation and what the country can do.
The leaders highlighted the need to protect the financial aid faith-based institutions receive and stop any threats of losing money if certain values are not enforced. Todd J. Williams, provost at Cairn University, said: “Schools will begin to cave because they’re worried about the millions of dollars that will go out the door.”
Father Robert Sirico, a priest at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said he was recently affected by a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that redefined sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
“While presented as a matter of fairness, this reinterpretation proposes grave dangers, grave risks for all religious institutions, even those like Sacred Heart that receive absolutely no public support,” he said.
Sacred Heart has filed a lawsuit to combat the issue, but Sirico said what needs to be done “exceeds the competency of [the] commission and the competency of this administration.”
“We have to think of this in existential terms, and we have to come at this project with the understanding that this is going to take years to transform. This is why religious people can transform the world: We believe in something that’s greater than our politics. We can reenvision.”
