Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Kevin Wells, Catholic author, via phone on February 11th, 2026. Some of the questions/answers have been rearranged, edited, and paraphrased to provide the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given.
Father Al first encountered, around 1939, heroism through comic books like Boy Commandos. How do you think God sometimes uses pop culture as a “gateway drug” to sanctity?
I think at a point in time God did use things like Tolkien’s The Hobbit, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. But in our current culture, less and less pop culture has that ability because they don’t promote Christian virtue.
But this is why I love what Voyage Comics is doing. They are reclaiming lost territory in Catholicism in pop culture.
You’ve written about Father Al with obvious affection. When did admiration turn into something more like friendship?
It’s interesting, it happened in 2020. Right when Covid came down on a guillotine in America. Father Al came to me as a friend during that time. He lived the virtue of magnanimity in a bold way. I read the 900 page compilation the Vatican gathered and published on Father Al’s life. In that time, he really became a friend because of all the social distancing we had from family during that time. I was captured and quickly moved by the magnitude of one one man could do to fight the darkness.
In Fear Nothing, we see Father Al confronting bullies at every stage of his vocation. What do you think modern Catholics misunderstand about spiritual courage?
I think it’s the same thing in the secular world: we really need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Father Al understood God’s Will and Mary’s Maternal Protection would keep him in line and protected despite his fears and doubts.
Still, he was human. When he was diagnosed with ALS in 1989, Father Al did not want to go to Mexico to start the Boystown and Girlstown communities, and the Sisters of Mary persisted in having him confront his fear. They took what he taught them and poured it back into him. So it was the religious community he founded that pushed Father Al to remember his vow to always fight for his muse, Mary, The Virgin of the Poor. So in spite of his weakened body fear, and pain he would increase – he hopped on a plane headed to Mexico.
Your partnership with Voyage Comics brought Father Al’s story into the visual, action-driven world of comics. Why tell a saint’s story in that format instead of a traditional biography?
For two reasons: I believe that Father Al was deeply impacted by a comic at a young age. And secondly – there are so few elements (books and videos) in pop culture that promote Catholicism. This comic is on a true hero-priest – who never blinked as he took on evil throughout his life. His witness of heroism and holiness is capable of spurring many children to seek the same – perhaps even console many to detach from technology and seek more nobility, courage, and virtue through characters in a book.
You’ve journeyed deeply with Father Al’s life. How important is it for Catholics to “walk with” a particular saint rather than just admire them from a distance?
You asked a very important question, I think Catholic masculinity gets it wrong. It has nothing to do with a cigar, oiled beard, or a leather book. Some programs focus on just learning about saints. The faithful Catholic man doesn’t need to learn only about a saint but to become a saint.
Man must confront those parts of the world where God seems to be vanishing and replaced by the tolls of modernity. Mankind must do hard things for God now.
So it’s no longer walking with the saints – it is becoming them. Saints rarely wanted to do these very difficult things, but since they were tethered to Christ’s Sacred Heart and devoted to doing his will – they completed the act. The greatest problem with the modern Catholic Church is that we are too used to comfort. We have become soft. Fr. Al wasn’t soft a single day in life, and because he wasn’t soft, he changed the world. Tens of thousands of souls were saved because Fr Al took things in for God.
We have become a society, in general, that often refuses to pick up the Cross. That’s another reason I fell in love with Father Al – he picked up his Cross each day of his life.
Was there a moment in researching Father Al when you felt personally challenged—or even corrected—by his example?
Heck yeah, I was kicked in the teeth the entire time. I was like galaxies away from his level of holiness. It was Father Al’s ability to conform his life to help the abandoned, poor, abused, and rejected wherever he could that was so inspiring.
Beyond Father Al, are there other saints you feel a particular devotion or friendship with?
Yes, Saint John Vianney. He was raised as a child during the French Revolutions. Little John Vianney told his mother that he wanted to be a priest despite the gore of thousands who were beheaded for their Catholic faith. He had everything against him (lacked theological opulence, failed out of seminary three times, and couldn’t pass Latin). He was like Forest Gump; he didn’t have a lot of human gifts. But John persisted and gave himself totally. He would hear confessions 14 hours a day. He healed numberless souls because he allowed God to do the work. No one in the history of the world has absolved more sin than Saint John Vianney.
If a young reader picks up Fear Nothing, what do you hope happens in their imagination—and in their prayer life?
In a practical way – I hope they will share with their mom and dad about Father Al. And that mom and dad read the comic and learn what it means to change the world through sacrifice.
There’s a point in the comic, Father Al moved into a shack to live to give up his comfort in order to save the poor. I hope the child reads that and recognizes that in order to become like Father Al it’s a process of elimination. Taking away oneself and one’s technological comforts to become more like Christ.
About Kevin
Kevin Wells is an award-winning Catholic author, acclaimed Catholic speaker and former sports reporter with the Tampa Tribune, where he covered Major League Baseball. He is the best-selling author of two books, including Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz and The Priests We Need to Save the Church, a written plea for holy priests written in the aftermath of 2018 scandals. The Priests We Need was quickly disseminated to seminaries on four continents, and has been read by faithful Catholics throughout the world.
Wells is an active evangelist who has spoken on a national Catholic stage including the Legatus Summit, Napa Institute, That Man is You, on EWTN, the TASTE program, as well as hundreds of other men’s and women’s conferences, retreats, missions, and on television, radio, and podcasts, where he often speaks on the urgent need for heroic lives of virtue and untamed Catholicism in the public square. His articles have appeared in Crisis Magazine, Catholic World Report, The Imaginative Conservative, The National Catholic Register, Catholic Exchange, LifeSiteNews, and Homiletic and Pastoral Review and various other periodicals.
Wells’s searing memoir: The Hermit: The Priest Who Saved a Soul, a Marriage, and Family (Ignatius Press) received wide literary acclaim from best-selling Catholic authors, theologians, and clergy throughout the world in 2024.
Inspired by the startling life of American Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, Wells traveled to Mexico and spent a month with The Sisters of Mary, a religious community founded by Venerable Schwartz. Wells was so moved by the stories of “Fr. Al” and witnessing firsthand the sisters’ round-the-clock work to nourish, catechize and care for 20,000-plus bullied teens, he penned the acclaimed best-selling biography: Priest and Beggar: published in 2021 by Ignatius Press.
Wells served as a “content expert” for the EWTN series “They Might Be Saints,” featuring Fr. Al Schwartz, in collaboration with Michael O’Neill, The Miracle Hunter. He is in the process of writing Fear Nothing, the story of “Fr. Al” for Voyage Comics.
In 2009, he survived a brush with death after a malformed line of vessels in his brain hemorrhaged. The day after invasive brain surgery failed to control the flow of blood, Kevin was anointed by Fr. James Stack – the longtime best friend of his murdered uncle, Msgr. Thomas Wells. To this day, witnesses in the neuro-ICU room tell of the miracle that unfolded at his bedside. He wrote Burst, A Story of God’s Grace When Life Falls Apart during his recovery.
Wells is the former president of the Monsignor Thomas Wells Society for Vocations, which commits itself to the promotion of strong priests, seminarians, and practicing the fullness of the Catholic Faith. His work with youth earned him the James Cardinal Hickey National Figure Award from the Archdiocese of Washington.
When Kevin is not writing and speaking, he enjoys spending time with The Sisters of Mary and their 20,000 children in Boystowns and Girlstowns throughout the world. Kevin loves baseball, reading, writing and lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.
