Forming the Hearts and Minds of Young Men | Jimmy Mitchell

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Jimmy Mitchell, director of campus ministry at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida and founder of Love Good. The two discuss the way music and architecture can soften the spirit and elicit noble desires. They dive into the culture of Jesuit Tampa and how sports, curriculum, and campus culture interact and create young men interested in faith and leadership. They also discuss the benefits of single sex education in combatting the cultural understanding of what it means to be a man. 

Transcript

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Folks, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. I'm here in Tampa, Florida at Jesuit High School, one of the flagship Catholic all-boys schools in the country. And I'm here with Jimmy Mitchell. Jimmy Mitchell is a big believer in the power of beauty to evangelize culture. Jimmy's gifts of storytelling and piano playing have brought him to every corner of the world. On top of being the founder of Lovegood,

He is the director of campus ministry here at Jesuit Tampa, which has repeatedly made national news for its growing culture of conversion. Between his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt and his master's in moral theology, Jimmy has always enjoyed the cross-section between faith, artistry, and entrepreneurship. Whether he's mentoring young people in virtue or interviewing award-winning artists in his studio, he loves nothing more than helping others fall in love with God.

Jimmy Mitchell, welcome to the Anchor Podcast. Thanks, Jeremy. Good to be with you, So I'm realizing, I think everybody I know knows Jimmy Mitchell. It's great to finally meet you in person. I hear just you're a man that is on fire with a heart for God and a heart for education, Catholic education, to immerse students in the true, the good, the beautiful, and lead ultimately to conversion. So thank you for the work that you're doing.

As we often do in the Anchor podcast, we'd love to start off and just hear a little bit about your story. What was education like for you growing up? Was it deeply connected to your faith or somewhat disconnected? A lot of that came later. Even just now knowing a little bit more your story, Jeremy, I think there's a lot of parallels. I discovered C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton in college and only great philosophers like Augustine and Aquinas when I was studying abroad in London. Up until that point, I'd say I did like

pretty typical American upbringing and I was in public school up until sixth grade and then Catholic school up until college and I had a real deepening of conversion as a freshman in high school, largely through the Eucharist. Just had a real beautiful encounter with God's love at a time in my life where I was sort of a budding eagle maniac and a bit of a perfectionist and always wanted to kind of prove myself, you know, playing three sports a year, going to this really fine.

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really wonderful Catholic prep school, but not a school that put a lot of emphasis on faith and formation. So I got off to college and I suddenly realized I was the only Catholic that I could find at Vanderbilt for the first couple of years. And that meant that most of my friends were either evangelicals who, you know, in some cases thought I was going to hell or they were atheists who thought I was crazy for having any faith at all, even a sense of morality, which is absurd to them.

But the conversion continued in college. was a little more intellectual at that point because of the discovery of these great minds that have obviously shaped Western civilization for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But eventually it was a deeper of falling in love with the church that led me to go into mass every day and then praying the holy hour and falling in love with the monastic traditions.

and prayers of our faith. And then I went to seminary, discerned out of that pretty quickly, because I knew Dostos and Priests just wasn't the Lord's will, but then that led into years of itinerant ministry and ultimately coming to work here at Jesuit. Okay. Talk to us about music. One of the things I've loved so much as I've discovered this classical education movement is it's a recovery of beauty through music. So much of the story of the transformation here at Tampa Jesuit is

recovery of beautiful liturgy. Music has been a big part of your life story. Tell us about that. Let me start by saying it's not uncommon to walk through this campus, to walk through the halls and to hear everything from our starting quarterback to, we'll say, the most evangelical Protestant on this campus.

to hear them just chanting the song, two, song, two, song, two. They had just heard it earlier. wild. That's wild. That's amazing. It's beautiful. We love it. It's hilarious. And we take over a hundred guys to Europe every summer on pilgrimage. it's the most spontaneous and natural thing in the world for them to just break out in the Salve. They're walking through the streets of London, walking through the streets. This is wild. This is so cool. It's what I first fell in love with in 2016 when I first helped with the pilgrimage. I wasn't working at the school. I was just this, you know.

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missionary who did a lot of work with parishes, diocese, schools, summer camps all over the world. Got connected to Jesuit and realized that this is the kind of young men they're producing. I want to be a part of this. I never thought I'd work here full time. But I always, always, always admired the work from a distance. yeah, music, whether it's liturgical music that you see in a school like this or, you know, the parishes that are really getting it right.

all the way to the kind of singer-songwriter and even very secular than music that I was a part of in Nashville. For years, a big part of my work was supporting singer-songwriters. So we're talking musicians, composers, all the way up to people that played fiddle and sang background vocals for some of biggest stars in country music. Many of were Catholic, many of were my friends and

We just built a community around this desire, this dream that we had for beauty to save the world. And to borrow the phrase, obviously, of Dostoevsky, it's something that we really took to heart. And I was always a piano player from the time I was little. Started to compose little film scores, mostly for movies that didn't exist. And I started to incorporate that into a lot of my own speaking and preaching and traveling. And I loved it. I really loved it. But I was pretty humble living in Nashville.

You know, because there's so much talent. And I think, you you look all the way back at Plato, who could have cared less about writing the laws of the nation. He said, let me write it to music because nothing shapes hearts and minds faster. You know, from my own experience with it and obviously my study and own personal love for it, I've just come to realize whether we realize it or not at any given moment, music, which is playing for about eight hours a day in the background of most America.

lives. Eight hours a day we're absorbing music, intentionally or unintentionally. It is either predisposing our soul to virtue or to vice. It is either helping us live the good life or making it more difficult. So you might argue that yeah music is mostly morally neutral, but it is either doing this great work of cultivating virtue or cultivating vice and which do you want man? I mean I talked to our students about it all the time. We just had Eric Janess on campus about a month ago. Famous, beautiful,

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He's composer. He's been in movies and scored all kinds of soundtracks for major Hollywood releases. He had a cameo with Kevin James and Mall Cop 2, you know? But he also does prison ministry. He also goes to Massive Identity Cannes. He's just this really, really solid, devout guy. But his mission is to help people be more intentional with the kind of music and the kind of media that they curate.

because he realizes it impacts the soul, it bypasses the intellect sometimes, and it shapes us in a way that is really, really deep. How does this happen? mean, students spontaneously singing Salve Regina on campus. I mean, how does this, is this just a God thing? Can you cultivate this kind of culture? How does this happen? It's all about culture. It's all about leadership and culture. I'm convinced of that because 15 years ago, no one was telling stories like this out of Tampa.

Yeah, we were always a good school. We were always doing great in sports, decent in academics, and we were like most Catholic high schools. You know, we had some priests and we had some all school masses in the gym here and there. And in this case, we did have a chapel. It was just, you know, a little less, we'll say European and ornate than the one we currently have in the middle of campus. know, we definitely 15 years ago under new vision and leadership started to, you know, till the soil.

take the steps and slowly transform this place. I mean, I can't even really claim to be a part of that week because I only really got involved about 10 years ago. And before that first pilgrimage I went on, I came for a freshman retreat in 2014. We were having all of the masses in a gym because the previous chapel was getting torn down and rebuilt. There were good things happening. There were good people on campus, but even 10 years ago, the culture had not yet shifted. There was initially a renewal, I would say,

in the theology department, followed by campus ministry, which is now known as the Office of Mission and Formation. We slowly started to put the most faithful, kind of like-minded Catholics we could find in positions of leadership, whether that was the administration or heads of departments, and certainly even things like student life. Our direct student life right now is a convert to the faith and just a really, really on fire.

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Catholic who's also a brilliant intellectual. You know, I mean, I'm impressed with any school that can build that kind of culture, but it takes time. And people always want to know where you start anywhere. Just start anywhere and then let it slowly incrementally build. And we were blessed to have the same president, a wonderful Jesuit priest by the name of Father Hermes here for 16 years. And that makes a big difference as well. And it's rare to have priesthood leadership in a Catholic high school.

and certainly to have one for 16 years. All so we got to talk about that because when I've been telling folks back home about Jesuit Tampa, one of the first reactions they say, what? A Jesuit school? Why do people have that reaction? Well, I mean, let's put it this way. My freshman year at Vanderbilt, the Catholic chaplain on campus was a Jesuit who was vocally pro-choice, who brought women in to preach his homilies and then would make some case for why they should be ordained priests.

priestesses, you know, and then thanks be to God he had anger management issues as well. So he eventually got kicked out for that reason. You know, there was just enough complaints coming from students to the bishop when he was asked to leave and go back to Boston where he belongs, you know. But man, that's most people's impressions on the ground level. Certainly was mine. I studied at a brought in London and the Jesuits I met over there, they were always nice. Just fucked.

Goofy, man. We had a pillow mass. We're all like sitting on pillows at this like little like why we're by the way in the side chapel of a gorgeous minor Basilica. And there we are having a little pillow mass off to the side. So like as a young person who wants to take life seriously and this is especially true of young men whose hearts want things want things that are challenging and noble and beautiful. How do you take that seriously? You can't you really can't. So, you know, I think I think we're seeing

the beginning of some beautiful renewal, not just amongst the Jesuits, but across the church. know, young priests, if they're under the age of 40, they're probably more likely to be wearing a cassock than They're probably more likely to celebrate a beautiful mass than not. And they're all Orthodox. I don't know any guys under the age of even 50 that aren't at least Orthodox at this point. So there's renewal. I shared this story last night at the talk and

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probably had the same conversation five times, folks saying, what's your travel look like for the end of the year? I'd say, Jesuit Tampa and then off to Rome and then Florence after that. And every time they say, wait, what? You're going to Jesuit Tampa? Like no interest in Rome or Florence, Jesuit Tampa. Like, let's talk about that. People say that is a serious school. They're doing incredible. They're doing incredible formation there, right? So now it's a school that folks are looking at. As I've talked to people here, people are coming and visiting. They're touring.

And it's excelling in these different areas. I mean, it's a powerhouse in terms of athletics. It's excellent in terms of academics. It's on fire for Christ in terms of the Catholic identity. It's often the case that folks will say there's a tension between athletic excellence especially and faithful Christian identity. Is that a false tension? Why do people think that? I mean, not only is it a false tension, it's a missed opportunity. I mean, I would say...

A lot of the best virtue formation that happens on our campus happens on the sports fields. Our head baseball coach, I'm convinced of this. One of the reasons he has so much success, he wins a state championship every other year, is because of his own faith. He requires all of his guys to go to daily mass the morning before every game that they have, all throughout the baseball season. That's a couple of times a week usually. Our football team, absolutely before every home game and away game has a mass just for the team.

And I think the coaches more than ever because of the culture of the school have really tried to cultivate their own faith and therefore pass that along to their students, their players, but especially their team leaders. So I will say right now there's always so much that could be done in that area. I think there's always more formation that we could provide these coaches, more mentorship in their face so they can better mentor the young men entrusted to them every day on the practice field.

in the games and just over the course of the season. But I do think the culture is what makes a difference for us. And, you know, it was never uncommon to see our priest who was president of the school in the dugout, baseball games, always on the sideline of football games. Yeah. Always the last to get off the bus to give them a blessing on the way to a state tournament. know, that's huge. That's the presence of a spiritual father everywhere these students are.

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Father Hermes found himself. So I think there's a lot to say in that. I also would say that the school, I haven't seen these numbers too close in a while, but last I checked, our office of mission and formation has a bigger budget than the state championship baseball, wrestling and baseball and football teams combined. So the school is saying we're not going to slow down our pursuit of athletic excellence. In fact, we're going to keep...

you know, striving to be the number one sports program across every classification in state of Florida that we currently are and seem to, you know, sort of maintain every school year. We're not only going to keep pushing and keep striving in that area, we're going to continue to take academics to the next level. And I'm convinced that actually more and more moving our curriculum in the direction of what the CLT tests for is going to be huge part of that. But in the end, it's,

It's the formation. the relationship with Christ. It's the opportunity to form boys into men who are not just men for others as every Jesuit school strives to be, a place where boys become men for others, but also men after God's own heart. We take that very seriously. So many Catholic high schools, you know, will go a decade without having a single graduate pursue the priesthood. You mentioned last night that there's a couple dozen students that are discerning praying about.

contemplating maybe a call in this direction. Can you speak to that? Yeah, more than half of those guys are in a program right now called the Melchizedek Project, which is a phenomenal program put out by, actually, I have no idea who it's put out by. Deani Vocations, I think, is the resource where it comes out of, but it's becoming more and more a standard bearer for vocation directors across the country. And it's just bi-weekly formation and fraternity for guys who are thinking about the priesthood.

doesn't mean that they know that they're called. They may not even have like a 50-50 chance of being called, but in their heart there's openness. In their hearts there's some attraction to living their life in imitation of Christ through the priesthood. And so we're trying to obviously encourage and form them along the way. So that's a small part of it. We've also got some really amazing opportunities with the province, so the Jesuit.

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province that we're a part of, the Central Southern province offers this amazing retreat every single year in February, actually January. And you get close to 50 high school boys from all over the country coming together for a three day silent retreat where they can better discern their vocations and think about the Lord's will. And, you know, we are a Jesuit school, which means we have, I would say, a corner market on discernment. And this is what Ignatius contributed to the church, the rules of discernment and the spiritual exercises are, I would say, be top shelf.

way to figure out the Lord's will for your life. We're always, always helping our boys think about that. So I love this Scott Hahn quote, you know, where he says that, you know, not every man is called to the priesthood, but every man is called to be drawn to the beauty of it. And I think that's what you're doing here. And it's through this culture and the culture here is excellence in everything. But beauty is this huge part of the culture, the campus, the art, the chapel.

I was blown away with what I saw last night and this morning. Tell us about kind of the physical reimagining. And I think, you know, for the heads of school listening to this, this is happening all over the country. I you have these classical schools, Catholic school, classical charter schools that they've been growing, you know, for 20, 30 years. And they're in a phase now of being ready and able to build. And so they're starting to think, how do we make manifest our philosophy of education?

our love for the transcendentals, how do we make that real and physical space? And you get a sense of what Jesuit Tampa is about just by looking at what you physically have built. Tell us about that physical transformation of the campus. So from the chapel that was completely rebuilt six years ago from the ground up to the Lord's Grotto that we end every school day.

There's five, 10, 15 students who do a walk in the road through campus. It's the most normal thing in the world. You're like blowing through the football field, through the baseball field. The guys just think, yeah, yeah, those are the guys playing the road trip. They end in the grotto, they're kneeling on their rocks, they're having their little Solve Regina moment. To this beautiful new art center where you have a triptych of paintings commissioned in Spain, statues all over this campus that were commissioned in Florence.

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You do feel like you're getting a little glimpse of Europe at its best when you're on this beautiful, beautiful high school campus that feels more like a college. And I'll say that every bit of that's been intentional. think there's been an instinct on the part of our administration and increasingly on the part of our board of directors and alumni benefactors that beauty really does matter. It has this slow drip effect on the soul.

mentioned this last night to you, Jeremy, one of our seniors a couple of years ago who was so moved by the installation of the statues of the four evangelists in our chapel that he came to my office the next day said, Mr. Mitchell, I can't really tell you why this is happening, but I feel like my heart has been burning with the desire to pray ever since yesterday's statue were blessed and installed. And I don't really know what to do with that. You know, I'm thinking to myself, this is a campus minister's dream. A senior?

who is, you know, checked out academically, absolutely could care less about anything else going on, is walking into my office with a burning desire for prayer. It wasn't like I had to give some talk on a retreat to elicit that burning of desire. It was just some beautiful, beautiful Florence, you know, commissioned statues that did it for him. And so, yeah, I think architecture and obviously landscaping and even an emphasis on the arts makes a big difference. And this is

really at the heart of my own kind of personal charism, that beauty awakens the soul, beauty pierces the heart. It has a way of eliciting the most noble desires in the human heart so that we actually hunger for the truth, so that we wonder about what is actually the meaning of existence. And out of that wonder comes knowledge as we engage with truth. And out of that engagement, of course, comes a life of goodness and virtue and ultimately, holiness.

Jimmy, I'm wondering if you could offer some wisdom here. I think this is something that many of the Catholic schools are struggling with, certainly true for our Protestant brothers as well. That's when these schools become kind of the flagship school in the area. Suddenly parents want to have their kids there, maybe not because it's passionately Catholic or passionately Christian, but because it also has awesome athletics and it's beautiful and the colleges are coming and recruiting their students.

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And so I think there's a healthy debate happening right now of saying, you know, what percentage of non-Catholics should we omit, you know? And can this be a tool of the new evangelization? But maybe we lose the culture of students spontaneously singing Salve Regina on campus if we don't preserve, you know, a certain threshold of how do y'all navigate that here? Whenever asked how many students are Catholic on campus or what percentage of the student body is Catholic.

Our admissions director, he always quips, well, it depends on what time of the school year you ask. That's my way of saying that actually we are quite, quite open to non-Catholics on this campus because we are really unyielding and unwavering and quite, I wouldn't say over the top, but certainly bold in our proclamation of the gospel, in our formation, in the fullness of the faith, which is what the

Catholic Church offers. It's what our school strives to bring to every young man who comes through these doors. So all that to say, we do start most school years, 71, 72 % of the student body Catholic. We end most school years 75, 76 % because 18, 20, sometimes 22 guys are coming into the faith, they're receiving their sacraments, are converting to Catholicism.

the last all-school mass of the year. And by the way, far more than half of those are getting baptized, which means far more than half of them have never heard the gospel or never received the fullness or even just the most basic fundamentals of their faith up until the time of Jesuit. So the mentality has got to be, hey, let's not get so nervous about our Catholic identity that we have to...

reach a certain number of Catholics in the student body every year. Let's face it, the vast majority of them, at least, you know, in my experience, growing up in Atlanta and now living in Tampa, and even in my time in Nashville for 15 years, how many of these guys are coming from devoutly Catholic homes, practicing Catholic homes? I mean, the mass majority aren't. I'm blown over when I hear about a student going to Sunday mass every single week. That's...

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That's like a big deal around here. Let's talk about single sex education. My daughters go to Mountain of Sales Academy. One just graduated, all girls Catholic school. And I worked there for a couple of years and it was very clear to me very quickly that girls act very different in an all girls school than in a co-ed school where I'd always been before. Just being here, the culture of turning boys into men who are after God's heart.

There is a serious gender component there. mean, to what extent could what's happening here happen if it was a co-ed setting? I don't know. Talk to us about this component of single sex, all boys school, and what that means as well for all girls school, and when some schools should maybe separate if they can't, but maybe have separate classes for various grades and that kind of thing. love your- Yeah. The fact that it's all boys, mean, that discriminates every aspect of the school, our student life.

Certainly how a classroom is run, how all of our retreats operate, the fact that we even can do these wilderness retreats in Wyoming and Utah every summer. Our pilgrimage is to Europe. I would say they all hinge on this very deeply kind of masculine formation that we're trying to offer. So I'm a big believer in it. I've dedicated most of my adult life to the formation of young men and virtue and in faith.

I actually just didn't think it was possible to do it at this level in an educational setting. So I'm quite impressed that you can form young men outside of summer camps, outside of weekend retreats, outside of even one-off pilgrimages and mission trips and actually build into the culture of a school day in and day out. That is, I would say, a central component to what makes the work that we do here so fruitful.

You know, and I'm thinking about again, the retreat program, the classroom, the way that we have, you know, convocation every single morning in the chapel. you could get up there, and, open your talk this morning, Jeremy, with the line, you know, where are you going to go pick your next fire? Or with whom are you going to pick your next fight? And then you can reference Braveheart, even if most of them haven't seen it. And we all know exactly what you're after because you're appealing to this deep desire in every young man's heart.

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to go and fight that battle to make their lives worth living. You know, and so I would say it's paramount. There's like all kinds of data around this, you know, find me, you know, I'm trying to say this humbly, but find me one of the Catholic high school that produces, you know, 20 to 22 converts every school year has 15 to 20, sometimes upwards of 25 young men discerning vocations that can pull that off in a coed environment. I just don't think.

the ability to specify and customize the formation is there, nor is the ability to really challenge them and take them to the heights. And I don't know why that is, but in most coed schools, the girls are the ones who are into the faith. They're the ones who run the show in the campus ministry. They want to lead the retreats. And it makes it very hard for boys to get into the faith at all because it becomes girlish and, you know, in their minds, not a thing that men do. So well said. What is our culture? Entertainment, music?

What does it say it means to be a man? yeah. Wow. And there's a widespread of confusion right there. You know, I always think about this 2008, 2009, dockers advertisement. It was thrown up on social media and it was basically this long diatribe about how men have lost their role in society and there's children misbehaving and little, ladies who need to be walked across the street and, you know, put down on the plastic forks at the salad bar and grow up. You know, the whole line was where the pants, you know,

And it only lasted a few hours on social media before it was taken down, charges of sexism, et cetera, et cetera. But that was only 15 years ago. That made it through the marketing department of Docker. It's like unbelievable to think of now. That would never happen in 2024. So what does the culture say it means to be a man? Gosh. It's everything from the sort of constant, you know.

self-deprecating, I'm thinking about, you know, like Homer Simpson, foolish and incapable of leadership kind of dynamic and this sort of, I hate to go all the way to the extreme with this, but this sort of ultra feminism that makes it hard for men to lead and to serve and to protect and to provide and to vision cast and.

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and to do great things with their lives because they feel this need to constantly kind kowtow or, you know, sort of defer. So I do think right now that the confusion is all over the place. Gender ideology doesn't really seem to be slowing down, maybe in certain parts of the world, certain parts of the country. We've made some real progress there. But I'll tell you this, the truth is that men are made to give a total gift of themselves.

a radical sacrificial love is what they're called to live. And unless we call them to it and unless there are men willing to reach into the hearts and lives of boys and help them become that, it won't happen. I what do we want? TikTok to raise our boys into men? as you put it last night, the Poison Ivy League. And I went to Vannabelle, it's like kind of a wannabe Ivy League school.

I had all kinds of all kinds of conflicts, not only while I was there, but soon after I left with people who were in the administration, people who were on the board of directors, people who actually funded my full scholarship to Vanderbilt, who just couldn't handle the truth of what it really means to be a man in today's world, largely because I went off to seminary, largely because I then helped launch an apostolate that exists specifically to form men.

voice into men to give them an authentic masculine spirituality to even use that kind of language on their center. Yeah. And we're here with Jimmy Mitchell. The school is Jesuit in Tampa, Florida. Jimmy, I'm blown away with this place. Thank you for what you're doing here, for your ministry, for what this entire faculty administration is building to pour into this next generation of young men. It's a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming and certainly inspiring us and also

encouraging us. We sometimes, like a lot of people, feel a little isolated. So it's great to be a part of something bigger. Thank you.