King's Men seeks to build up religious faith among fathers and sons

Dan Martin lost his sister after she suffered a sudden heart attack, and he has vowed to raise his teenage nephew as his own.

For the Levittown train dispatcher, that means not only providing room, board, and surrogate fatherhood to a teen whose father lives out of state, but passing down his Catholic faith, man to man.

So Martin and nephew Brian Corcoran went with 80 others on a weekend retreat to French Creek State Park for four days of brotherhood, wilderness, weaponry - and God.

"When my uncle proposed the idea, I was kind of like, 'eh,' " said Corcoran, a 10th grader at Neshaminy High School in Middletown Township, Bucks County. But the weekend turned out to be "a real bonding experience," he said.

The retreat was one of several annual weekends called Into the Wild held by the King's Men. The largely Roman Catholic men's spirituality group believes men have drifted away from churches and need to reconnect with their faith.

Its strategy is to mix church with the kind of activities some would attribute to a man's man, and in doing so, help men fulfill their roles as "leader, protector, provider," and believer.

"Men think of anything faith-based as feminine and girly," said group co-founder Damian Wargo, 36, of Philadelphia. "Kids grow up with dads who aren't in the church. The faith of a family is something that the mother takes care of."

Formed in 2006, King's Men has about 150 members, with five meeting groups in Philadelphia, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties. Two satellite groups are based in Louisiana and Indiana. The men meet weekly to talk and share experiences.

Several times a year, the group holds the retreat weekends, which have drawn men from as far away as California and Colorado. The four-day camping retreat mixes he-man activity with prayerful reflection.

Earlier this month, members of a group ranging in age from 11 to 68 learned to find their way through the forest using only compass and map, practiced firing at a shooting range, fished for their dinner, cooked duck on a spit, and slept in cabins with no electricity.

Corcoran helped pile hot rocks on top of a whole pig the group cooked in a pit.

One night, sitting around a bonfire, a father and son shared their story, then embraced, and said, "I love you," to each other.

Cofounders Wargo and Mark Houck of Quakertown talk about the group in the context of their own conservative beliefs.

The King's Men, which was also cofounded by Wargo and Houck's friend Tony Luna, is proabstinence and antiabortion, and believes that marriage "is between one man and one woman." Its members regularly protest outside adult book and video stores.

"Men are not to be lords over their wife and child, but they are to lead and serve," said Houck, 36, who also has a program twice a month on Holy Spirit Radio, a Catholic station in Bucks County. "Women complement the men's role through trust, surrender, and receptivity. Equal dignity, different roles."

Paula M. Kane, an associate professor of contemporary Catholic studies at the University of Pittsburgh, says Houck's language appears to revive a traditional model of male spirituality that refers to men as the top dog and women as a complement.

"That hasn't served women well," said Kane, an editor of Gender Identities in American Catholicism. "It's meant that men had the power, while women put the flowers on the altar."

The King's Men follows in the tradition of the Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian men's group that flourished in the mid-1990s, said Stephen B. Boyd, a professor of religion at Wake Forest University and author of The Men We Long to Be: Beyond Lonely Warriors and Desperate Lovers.

The Promise Keepers had a conservative view of men's and women's roles, but it also promoted the value of men opening up and sharing their emotions with other men, Boyd said.

"In some ways, it's difficult to understand what a man's supposed to be like these days," he said. "Increasing numbers of us are not the only primary breadwinners. Our jobs have changed so much that the superior physical strength that made it natural for us to be the breadwinner, well, it doesn't take that to sit in front of a computer.

"When things are up in the air," he said, "one clear option is to go" traditional.

During the retreat weekend, Mass was held outdoors in a clearing. The campers arranged logs as pews; lifted rocks to form an altar; and shaped branches, mud, and rocks to create a grotto.

After the retreats, the men are expected to go back to their communities and put their faith into practice in their churches and relationships at home.

"When you come home from work and you're tired, you tend to want to retreat. You think, 'I've provided for my family, and it's done,' " said Mark Jurchak, 52, an engineer from Chadds Ford who attended the weekend with his 17-year-old son, Matthew.

"But I'm called to be a husband and a father, and I have to realize the strength to act on it."