5 Catholic leaders, old friends talk faith, friendship at Prairie Troubadour conference

“All expressions of human experience are most completely understood through the lens of the Church’s understanding of the world,” said Christopher Check, the president of Catholic Answers and a member of a group of five longtime Catholic friends known as the Troubadours. “The reality is that if it’s good, or true or beautiful, … it belongs to the Catholic Church.”

The group of men — which includes Dale Ahlquist, president of the G.K. Chesterton Society; Daniel Kerr, president of St. Martin’s Academy; author Joseph Pearce, and Thomas More College President William Fahey — produce the “Tuesdays with the Troubadours” podcast, an outgrowth of their annual Prairie Troubadour conference, which took place in mid-February in Fort Scott, Kansas, on the theme “For Love of God and Country,” focusing on the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

EWTN News sat down with all five Troubadours on a Zoom interview for a spirited discussion about friendship, the joy they find at the conference and on the podcast, and a rousing rendition of “Flower of Scotland” sung by Pearce, an Englishman.

The group is a “dear friendship among five men who’ve known each other a long time,” said Check, who lives in Southern California. “I marvel that I am one of this group because all those guys are great scholars and here I am in there with them, and I am deeply grateful.”

Kerr, who founded St. Martin’s Academy, a Catholic boys’ boarding school in Kerr’s hometown of Fort Scott that focuses on educating boys to love Jesus Christ through classical academics, farm work, and prayer, started the conference in 2016 in honor of his father, Gerald Francis Kerr, who passed away in 2015.

“These men here have been my mentors,” Kerr said, referring to the other four men on the Zoom call. “Since my father’s passing, you guys are somewhere between older brothers and father figures for me.”

“In Dale’s case, a grandfather,” Check quipped.

For their podcast, the Troubadours are “inspired to live and share the joy of Christ through stories, songs, and good red wine.” Its annual symposium aims for “lively discourse punctuated by earnest prayer, toothsome food, strong drink, and the real mirth found in friendship,” according to the group’s website.

Fahey, who lives in New Hampshire, told EWTN News he suggested the podcast in 2020, during what Kerr called the “dark period of the spring of 2020,” the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re not doing it for the viewers,” Check said. “We’re doing it as an excuse to get together with four other people that we love.”

During the interview, Fahey joked about the “beautiful” view behind Pearce, who was sitting on his backyard deck at his home in South Carolina, saying the view put him in the mood for a song: “Can you sing ‘Oh Flower of Scotland’ for me right now?”, he asked.

Pearce obliged in a deep baritone.

‘Prairie Troubadour feels like home’

To Fahey, the Prairie Troubadour conference “feels like home.”

“I love coming to Fort Scott. Every year, the town has been healed a little bit more, it’s becoming more of itself, and Dan is the chief architect of that, whether he will admit it or not,” Fahey said.

Fort Scott is a small, historic town of fewer than 8,000 people in southeastern Kansas, serving as the county seat of Bourbon County. It is the home of the Fort Scott National Historic Site, managed by the National Park Service and serving as an example of a mid-19th-century U.S. Army fort on the frontier.

The downtown business district has seen revitalization in the last several years.

“I feel like we’re participants in the renewal of this town,” Fahey said, “and in seeing St. Martin’s grow, and that couldn’t happen if it wasn’t in the same place with these particular people.”

“It’s a whole conference of kindred spirits,” Pearce told EWTN News in his strong British accent. “I like the location. Fort Scott still has that sort of character, it’s a bit of a backwards place, it’s got a lot of history. It hasn’t been replaced with a lot of concrete and strip malls. It’s like going back to the real America.”

“It’s a retro conference in a retro place with retro people,” Pearce said, laughing.

Ahlquist said the Prairie Troubadour conference is one of his favorites — “and I go to a lot of conferences!” — because the evenings are unique. The St. Martin’s boys, current students and alumni, belt out American and Irish folk songs and play guitars and fiddles while attendees dance or catch up with old friends. He said people who experience it want to experience it again, and they come back.

He said one word to describe when the Troubadours get together is “joy.”

Check agreed. “It’s palpable for the whole weekend. There has to be something at work here because Dan [Kerr] gets hundreds of people to come from all over the country to this small town in Kansas in the middle of February,” he said with a laugh.

“On the Tuesday podcast, as anyone who’s watched will realize, whether the conversation is about what frying pan do we like to cook with or what we are doing for our summer reading, all of these questions have a Catholic answer to them. I think we provide that,” Check said.

“Everywhere we go, we meet people who tell us how much of an impact Tuesdays with the Troubadours has,” Kerr said. “It is amazing.”

‘Loneliness’ one of the pains of the modern world

“There’s a lot of loneliness in the modern world, especially because of screens,” Check said. “If we can be something of an example of fraternity and friendship in this age of loneliness, well, glory to God.”

Ahlquist noted that “the great irony is we were able to maintain this great friendship through the screen.”

“But every one of these friendships began incarnate first! I remember the very day I met each one of you,” Check, who described himself as the “sentimental one,” said.

“The conference and podcast are very much a glimpse of what life will be like on the other side of the veil, when we’re united,” he continued. “The two things Pope Benedict says make us human, the worship of God and friendship, and we’ll be united together in those things for eternity.”

Check said his favorite moment of the weekend was Friday afternoon before the conference began, when the five friends sat on the back porch of a historic mansion on an old brick street in downtown and just talked about a wide range of things, including listing their three favorite Robert Duvall movies. The actor died on Feb. 15 at the age of 95.