The Earthly Father of CatholiCity

by Bud Macfarlane Jr. - April 2021

My father, Bud Macfarlane Sr., will turn 88 in June, yet in my mind's eye, he's always 40, so it was a bit of a jolt to see the present-day, wrinkled version in person when I went to visit him and my mom before going to the Blue Army Shrine on Divine Mercy Sunday.

Tens of thousands of people have heard him in person, although it is more likely that you are one of the several million souls inspired by his Marian Apparitions Explained recording.

My visit got me to pondering how my father has never promoted himself, nor has he ever taken a fee for any of the hundreds of talks he started giving while I was in college nearly forty years ago. Before the Internet ever existed, several million people heard him echo the words of Mary and Jesus. This is the miraculous story of how this came to be.

While he continues to give talks today, until his retirement at age 71, he worked long hours as an executive in the packaging industry. Thus his evangelization efforts were a truly a labor of love, and, as you will see, he always relied upon God, not his own plan.

Fatima and People Express

A devout Catholic since early childhood, the Holy Spirit set my dad on fire on May 13th, 1982. This was the very same day Saint John Paul II was in Fatima to publicly thank Our Lady for saving him from the poison bullet that came very close to killing him exactly one year earlier in 1981. (As you probably know, Mary's first appearance to the children at Fatima took place on May 13th, 1917.)

My parents happened to be at Niagara Falls on an unplanned weekend lark because my dad saw an ad in the Saturday morning paper proclaiming that the original discount airline, People Express, was offering $19 fares to Buffalo, New York. They drove to Newark Airport and saw the falls that afternoon.

The next day, after Sunday Mass, my father, who knew very little about Our Lady's apparitions at the time, bought a book at the gift shop about Our Lady of Fatima, in part because he was vaguely aware that the pope was in Portugal from television reports.

Well, Dad stayed up all night reading that book, utterly transfixed, and woke my mother the next morning, insisting with his slow, controlled intensity, while lightly tapping his index finger on the cover...

"Pat, this book has changed my life. The Holy Spirit has spoken to me through this book. I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to learning everything about Our Lady and her appearances on earth."

Mom, reasonably, thought he sounded a bit nuts.

By the way, would you like to know the name of the church where my mother and father happened to attend Mass just outside of Niagara Falls? A local shrine named after Our Lady of Fatima!

My father has a genius-level IQ and an astounding memory. A valedictorian in high school and an outstanding athlete, he could have attended any college in the country, but instead he went straight into the Marine Corps at the height of the Korean War.

Handsome, tall, blue-eyed, and supremely gifted, he had prepared since boyhood to become a professional entertainer. His act included dozens of spot-on impersonations weaved seamlessly into stand-up comedy. Before meeting my mother, he was well on his way to stardom, but she wisely asked him during their engagement to give up show business on account of his heavy drinking, which that lifestyle exacerbated.

My father agreed without regret, and eventually gave up drinking when I was a young boy, attributing his deliverance from alcoholism to the miraculous intervention of Saint Jude.

Already steeped in Scholastic theology from a traditional pre-Vatican II Seton Hall night-school education, after his Niagara Falls epiphany, he spent countless hours devouring everything in every book he could find concerning historical, approved Marian Apparitions and Marian theology. My father began to discern the subtle connections and the larger themes throughout the centuries. He memorized thousands of facts, dates, and Our Lady's words, while calling authors and visiting apparition sites. It is not an exaggeration to characterize his knowledge as encyclopedic.

He began an intense study of the preparation methods of his hero, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, one of the greatest orators of the twentieth century. God had already given my father the natural speaking talent, the voice, the confidence, and decades of experience in holding an audience in the palm of his hand.

After hearing my father discuss his research during an informal conversation, one of his fellow Knights of Columbus asked him to speak to a local group of Knights in New Jersey. After that informal talk, another Knight then asked him to speak at a local parish. That led to more parishes, and, eventually, to Catholic conferences all over the country.

My father always spoke without notes, having completely mastered his subject. He always spoke free of charge. Always in his free time. He has never once volunteered his willingness to anyone to speak anywhere. He simply waited to be asked. He even refused to be recorded or allow videos of his talks.

My father also always gave away free books and materials (on his own dime) at every talk. Can you see the pattern now?

As a boy, I idolized my bigger-than-life father, who generously gave me nine beautiful sisters and one incredible younger brother. Although I did not inherit his intellectual firepower or outsized talents (but I can do a horrible impersonation of Kermit the Frog), I began reading the books he sent me while I was a student at the University of Notre Dame.

Several years later, my dad was not even aware he was being recorded when he gave a talk in a New Jersey parish on the Feast of Saint Anthony. At the beginning of that talk, he mentioned how had just completed a novena to this "greatest preacher of all time."

Almost two years later, in October of 1991, against his advice but with his blessing, some of my fellow Knights of Immaculata and I gave away the first few hundred copies of that very talk at a pro-life conference in Cleveland. (I had to convince my father that this was not "promoting" him because we were giving them away as free gifts with a desire to spread Our Lady's message, not his.). I christened this new organization the Mary Foundation, a name without a mission that had been floating around in my mind for quite some time.

A Vast Ocean of Souls

At the end of that conference, I sat up like a shot in bed late at night, having seen in my imagination a vast living ocean of many millions of people, going into the horizon beyond sight. I saw countless people in the front being given free materials. Then the "principles" of the Mary Foundation were infused into my heart. (I can still see that ocean of souls now as I type these words--the image never leaves me.)

The next morning, I wrote down the principles, began guiding the Mary Foundation by them, and over the past thirty years, I have witnessed that striking image come true through your hard work and sacrifices.

Without any traditional advertising, by word of mouth alone, through one person giving another person one tape or CD at a time, millions of people worldwide have since heard Marian Apparitions Explained. It's one of the most popular Catholic recordings of all time (alongside Scott Hahn's conversion story, our second talk!).

Since then, tens of millions have been influenced by our other materials, our website, my novels, but mostly through God's pure grace working through your own lives, one person at a time.

No Plan But God's Plan

That baby Mary Foundation had no marketing plan. It had no budget. It had no money, except, almost literally, my last $500, which had been set aside for tithing, and which was used to buy a few hundred blank cassettes. There was no human plan.

As the above story illustrates, it was all Providence, all God's plan, and in particular, as you now know, Our Lady of Fatima's plan, from the beginning. My mother and father had been attending daily Mass and praying the Rosary through the crazy joys and deep suffering of raising their family through some of the most treacherous confusion and difficult times that all Catholic parents of their generation experienced.

Forty-one years after Our Lady appeared at Fatima, where the most spectacular public miracle since the parting of the Red Sea took place, my parents jumped happily into the supernatural miracle of holy matrimony in 1958. A quarter of a century later their love led to a ridiculously inexpensive flight to Buffalo in 1982. Their marriage is still filled with God's grace on this very day, in 2021, nearly four decades after their weekend getaway to see a gigantic waterfall.

One bullet led a pope to Fatima, which led my father, after a lifetime of preparation for public speaking, to one book, which led to one conversation, which led to one talk, which led to another talk, which led to the very first cassette tape, which led to millions of tapes and CDs and books...

...which led you to reading my words today.

God is all-powerful. He has a plan. He manifests His plan through the Mystical Body of Christ, which is made up of you and me, the baptized.

Remember it the next time you give someone one of our books, or prayer medals, or scapulars, or booklets.

God's grace is the Niagara Falls in your soul, my friend. (And you don't need a $19 ticket!)

The Evergreen Talk

Likewise, the Mantle of Mary Project, which culminated last week, also can trace back to Fatima in 1917.

At the Blue Army Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima this past Divine Mercy Sunday, Father John Anthony told me and the director of the Blue Army, David Carollo, that recently he had just re-listened to "Marian Apparitions Explained." Father John Anthony described it as "evergreen" because it applies better to 2021 than 1991.

My friends, I love to tell you stories, yet I do not, as a habit of mind, dwell on the past, except to learn from my many mistakes, and more importantly, to highlight and recognize the patterns of God's ever-perfect, mysteriously silent, and providential role in bringing all of us into the present moment.

As I never tire of reminding myself, you are part of this apostolate because Our Lady of Fatima sent you to us. All we need to do is cooperate with her plan, day by crazy day, which is God's plan.

Despite his immense natural talent and hard work, my father turned out to be a failure as a drunken comedian, because he wanted even more to be a good Catholic husband. Today I gaze upon the ultimate goal: to be a creaturely cooperator in the Divine Plan of Salvation History to bring every one of the billions of souls on this planet into the Catholic Church, the only Kingdom of God. By that measure, I consider my own life a tremendous, spectacular failure, so far.

So thank you for failing with me. Let's keep failing until we turn tens of millions into hundreds of millions.

During this year of Saint Joseph, in honor of my father, William Noble "Bud" Macfarlane, Sr., earthly father of this little project for Mary, thank you.

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Bud Macfarlane, founder of CatholiCity.com and the Mary Foundation, is the author of three bestselling Catholic novels, available free of charge from Saint Jude Media. You can comment on his articles here.