The Catholic Accent Podcast

19 - On the Road with Saint Paul: A Missionary’s Journey

• Diocese of Greensburg • Season 2 • Episode 9

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What if the greatest road story of all time isn’t about miles logged but a message carried through storms, stones, and cities that didn’t want to listen? We dive into Paul’s missionary journeys and discover how one man’s formation, courage, and companions turned the ancient world into a network of house churches, conversations, and conversions.

We start with the why: Paul isn’t out to win arguments; he’s announcing victory—the kerygma—news that Jesus has conquered sin and death. From synagogues to the Areopagus, he adapts without watering down. His Jewish roots and training under Gamaliel open doors in Israel; his Greek literacy helps him speak the language of logos and longing; his Roman citizenship grants legal standing that keeps the mission moving. Along the way, we face the grit of travel in a world without cars or inboxes: shipwrecks that would scare anyone off the water, a stoning that reads like a death and return, and a relentless resolve that makes his preaching credible.

Paul doesn’t go alone. Barnabas, Silas, Luke, John Mark, and Timothy appear as co-laborers who share prayer, risk, and friction. The split over John Mark becomes a surprising arc of mercy that may have gifted the Church a Gospel. We also talk about the economics of mission—tentmaking, hospitality, and the mendicant tradition—and why dependence on generosity creates real encounters. Rejection, dust-shaking, and humor thread through the story as reminders that boldness pairs best with humility.

By the end, we turn the map toward us: daily life as a journey of witness. Your workplace, kitchen table, and group chat are mission fields when gratitude becomes speech and service. If Paul’s road teaches anything, it’s that the Good News travels fastest through ordinary courage and shared lives. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend, and tell us: what’s the next “mile” of mission you’ll walk this week?

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Jordan Whiteko, Father Andrew Hamilton, Father Christopher Pujol, Vincent Reilly, Cliff Gorski, John Zylka, Sarah Hartner

SPEAKER_03:

You're listening to the Catholic Act of Podcast. We discussed the acts that Jesus performed that stunned his disciples. Great to be back, Jordan.

SPEAKER_01:

You don't know us by now, you're never gonna know.

SPEAKER_03:

I'm Jordan Waco here with Father Hamilton and Father Pooil. And we're both stunned. Why don't we get started? We'll jump right in with episode nine. We're on the road with St. Paul. Yeah, we're gonna talk about his missionary journeys. So, Jordan, do you like road trips? Driving, no. Well, you know what? I think it would depend on who you're with.

SPEAKER_01:

That is a big factor.

SPEAKER_03:

That's a huge factor, as we'll see from in here as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, but I feel like you would want to take way too many stops.

SPEAKER_03:

Me? No, I hate stopping. I want to get to the destination.

SPEAKER_02:

So you're like the passenger princess.

SPEAKER_03:

I would love to be, yes. I don't like to drive, but I will sit in the car on my phone, kick back, lean back. Yeah. You pack some snacks for that pimpling.

SPEAKER_01:

Driving Miss Daisy. Yeah. That's driving Jordan Lego.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, uh, it sucks when you're like in a relationship with two passenger princesses. That's why I think I need a why is there more than one?

SPEAKER_01:

Why are you in a relationship with a I understand what you meant by saying that that like your girlfriend would be a passenger princess and you are, but it made it seem like that you're in a relationship with two people that are passenger princesses at the same time.

SPEAKER_03:

I understood. Okay, my apologies. We won't use that part anyway.

SPEAKER_02:

That's pretty good.

SPEAKER_03:

Alright, so we know that the second half of the Acts of the Apostles covers St. Paul's missionary journeys. Why would St. Paul make these travels to proclaim the good news?

SPEAKER_01:

We gotta get the message out.

SPEAKER_03:

I mean he's convicted. Yeah, there's no there's no social media.

SPEAKER_01:

Paul wasn't sitting around, yeah, sending emails. So it was the new telegrams. He wasn't sending out the incarnation letter at 2 a.m. in the morning.

SPEAKER_03:

No newspapers?

SPEAKER_02:

Please subscribe. No Morse code even. He had to do it the old-fashioned way.

SPEAKER_03:

And that was like those were tough journeys, too, because what did it say? 10,000 miles to spread the gospel. So travel touring that time was dangerous. You know, it was uncomfortable whether you were on land or walking or by boat, not car. They didn't have those.

SPEAKER_01:

It's dangerous.

SPEAKER_03:

I mean, uh, there were bandits and harsh conditions. What made St. Paul the ideal missionary?

SPEAKER_02:

Number one, he was chosen, chosen by God to do so. So he had special graces. Divine commissioning. Yeah, divine commissioning. He had the grace to go forward to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth and taking on that risk. I mean, we know that St. Paul was involved in various shipwrecks. Um, you know, he would have come upon bandits, he would have been did he know how to fight? Oh, I'm sure.

unknown:

I'm sure.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, I mean, if he's going to call it, he made it, he made it to his destination. So if there were bandits, he's Paul learned that by persecuting Christians how to fight.

SPEAKER_01:

But his uh the Lord works with what we have, you know, what we give him. And so Paul's own background and culture certainly helped him to spread the gospel message. Thinking about him being a student of Gameliel, one of the the great rabbis and and teachers of Israel. So he has a great educational background, especially in Jewish culture, understanding being a Jew himself, which would give him access to the synagogues. And he's able to really talk to his own people in that way. But then also being born in Tarsus, he has a understanding of Greek realities and the uh the Greek world. And so you see that especially whenever he goes to Athens and he's able to talk to them more about Jesus as something coming from their own culture, like the word becoming flesh, kind of as we hear like in John's gospel, more about this understanding of the logos or the mind becoming present.

SPEAKER_02:

And using that Greek philosophy to really bring about an understanding of Christ.

SPEAKER_01:

And he's a Roman citizen, and we know that he's a Roman citizen by the end of his life. If you remember that Peter and Paul are both martyred in Rome eventually, but actually Paul is beheaded rather than crucified, and that delineated that he was actually a Roman citizen, and by that Rome even thought that crucifixion was so bad that they would never do it to their own citizens. It had to be somebody else that was treasonous or rebellious, that was not a good thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Paul received the dignified honor of being beheaded as a Roman citizen. That was the dignified recipe. Quite an honor. Quite an honor. And we still have his head today. Where is it? It's in the St. John Lateran. Him and you've seen this? The heads of St. Peter and Paul are above the high altar. That's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_03:

You know, talking more about his experiences, you mentioned shipwrecks, uh, persecution, um, which are vividly described twice, correct? In Corinthians. You want to touch really?

SPEAKER_01:

So his shipwreck, right? The ideal you get one shipwreck, you probably don't go back on a boat again. You just have had enough of it, unless you're perfectly. Like if your airplane goes down, yeah, you're not gonna fly again. Beyond that, he's there's a reason for that, though. Most likely. All right, anyways, we can bring back up again, and Jordan's real excited about this. Stoning. Oh, yeah. Yeah, loves the pile of stones.

SPEAKER_03:

And so love a pile of stones, a nice rock.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, do a good job, get stoned. Chuck a good rock. But what we see with Paul is that he's stoned, and actually, when you read the narrative, it seems like that Paul actually died after he was stoned. Usually stoning leads to death, and then he rises up again and he walks back into the city. So was Paul in that sense, in a way, really resurrected even after he died, which of course the Lord has already worked in in different ways throughout his own ministry with Lazarus and then his own resurrection uh and others coming forth from the tombs in Jerusalem. So, did he actually bring Paul back in that way? And Paul comes back and stronger than he's like, I'm back.

SPEAKER_02:

I have more letters.

SPEAKER_01:

Paul really lived out what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And so he continued.

SPEAKER_03:

I feel another song, another song coming up. Is that what you're saying? What doesn't kill you? Make you stronger.

SPEAKER_02:

That's where my mind went.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, we know. Um so St. Paul shares that core message of the gospel on these journeys, and you both mentioned charygma in previous episodes. So, how did St. Paul share the charygma?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we talked about charisma before as a sign of what has Jesus actually done for me, the living reality that Christ is alive, that he's transformed my own life, and this is the message that I'm sharing as part of the gospel message. But one of the connotations of charygma that's really beautiful is it connects to somebody that would be, say, at a military battle, right? And they would see a great victory that happened, and they would run back to a village or to the town, to the back part of the lines, and yell out to them about the great victory that was won, announcing that and the joy that comes with that. This charygmas uh from the Greek word herald, yeah, the one who brings the good news. Yeah. And so you can think of like even in the ancient Greek time, right? We have marathons that people run. It's after the great battle of marathon where the Greeks won and then the guy ran the whole way back to tell everybody else, and then he died afterwards.

SPEAKER_02:

The first marathon. So be careful running.

SPEAKER_03:

So St. Paul is doing the same thing essentially, right? He's going out and sharing the greatest victory of all, the victory of Jesus Christ over sin and death.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Yeah. That battle which we can't win on our own, that now has been won for us by the rising of Christ, his resurrection, and uh that is given to us as a promise if we apply those merits to ourselves.

SPEAKER_02:

So we see Saint Paul basically taking that that standard of Christ and going forth and proclaiming that message. And I mean, you have to think too, Saint Paul knows the risks he's taking because he has participated in what the adverse outcome or this reality would be for Christians, and so uh his witness becomes even that more tangible and credible because why would he be willing to risk his very life, his career, his success, everything that he knew for this Jesus man? And so that tells us that this truly happened. And so for those early people hearing this message, even the Greeks, they would have to ponder this must be true because he would not be pretty commitment, his commitment, his conviction is very yeah, convicting to other people.

SPEAKER_03:

Now we talked about how you know if we go on road trips, it depends on who you go with. I wouldn't want to go alone. So were there people that went with Saint Paul on these journeys?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so he had companions, which would be Barnabas, Silas, Luke, John, Mark, and Timothy. And these were different individuals that helped to proclaim the message with Paul. And the idea that Christ never sent out the apostles or the disciples really by themselves, but one of the early moves in the gospel that he has is to send out two by two together, and there's a strengthening there in accountability and a help to have a companion along the way. So they didn't all go together, these were separate at different times they went, yeah. Two by two.

SPEAKER_02:

And we even see that structure where you know Christ speaks in the gospels to his disciples take with you no second tunic, take with you no walking stick, take with you no money, go into every town and village, make the proclamation, and for those places where they don't accept, shake the dust from your feet and move on. And so Jesus laid out this uh this uh missionary example from the very start of his earthly ministry with with his disciples.

SPEAKER_03:

So, you know, uh going back to the his actual like travel, you know, when we take road trips now, you have to pay for gas, for food, for hotels. How did he afford stuff like that? What did he do?

SPEAKER_02:

They really relied on the goodness of others, and so even now you see with some religious communities, they will still this mendicant tradition of begging and asking others for sustenance for travel, for ways to really encounter people because think about it if you're on this large journey, you're gonna be hungry, you're gonna need uh shelter. Now he did work a little bit as a tent maker, but also he relied a lot on people's goodness. And when you have to ask for help, it opens up a conversation, and then he would be able to also use those moments to preach the gospel.

SPEAKER_01:

And the the labor is worth his due, is worth his pay, is what Jesus says. And so, in a real way, these uh other communities that Paul visits, they want to support him and especially his mission. Christ, we look in the Gospel of Luke, chapter eight, one of the ones that actually is a traveler, a companion of Saint Paul, uh, throughout his missionary work. We hear about Jesus that he had different women and different other widows and so forth that supported him in his own ministry. So it was something that was certainly already a tradition, like for the early Christians from Christ Himself and those that were spreading the gospel message, that people were able to help the mission by their own generous donations, which we still have today. Absolutely not everybody can go and preach the gospel message in over seas and foreign lands, but they can take part in that in a real way through the sustenance that they give to missionaries.

SPEAKER_03:

Were there instances where people weren't accepting where they would just be like, get out of here? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

You have to get rejected, you know, every once in a while. And uh keeps you humble. Yeah, it's it's part of the process where basically that's where the stoning comes from. You know, they don't want to hear the words that he's preaching and so forth, and that's what they would say.

SPEAKER_03:

It's like get out of here, you scoundrel. Like that's like that was exactly how it's like on our podcast. That was a retelling, exactly. All right, just making sure. Scoundrel. But one of the other things to mention, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01:

One of the other things to mention on these these trips is that there's actually tension that you see with Paul and Barnabas at a time, which is very interesting to look into. Just like we're human beings and you travel to the city.

SPEAKER_03:

It's two and two. Like if I went on a trip with Father Chris, he would drive me crazy.

SPEAKER_02:

You'd be out the window over a bridge.

SPEAKER_01:

But one of the things that Paul was really upset about, one of the things that Paul was really upset about was that John Mark, he kind of backed out of one of the trips that they were to go on, one of the missions. And so he said to Barnabas, just leave John Mark, who was his relative. And Barnabas said that he would not. Barnabas' name actually means son of encouragement, and so he encourages John Mark, who then in tradition people believe to be later the writer of the gospel of Mark, who takes a lot of his source material from Saint Peter, and so it's a beautiful story in that way that the son of encouragement encourages John Mark to continue in his way of following Christ, even after he's weak, and that leads to the writing down of the life of Jesus through the eyes of Saint Peter and the different uh early communities there that knew Jesus.

SPEAKER_03:

What journeys can we make to proclaim the gospel?

SPEAKER_02:

I think that each and every one of us are called from the very moment we wake up to the time we go to bed, that whole day should be a journey of proclamation, a journey of charigma, a journey of explaining what the Lord has done for us when we encounter and speak to others. And I think that first comes with recognizing our own faith, our own practice, the gratitude which we should have for the goodness of God. But every day is the journey, right? And there's so many cliches we could say, you know, the journey continues, a door closes, another opens. But really, all we have to recognize is that each one of us are on the same journey, moving from this world into the eternal heavenly kingdom. Part of the journey is the end, part of the journey is the end, and our end is God.

SPEAKER_03:

Thanks for listening to the Catholic Accent podcast. Don't forget to follow, like, and subscribe to our show. And that was like those were tough journeys too, because what did it say? 10,000 miles to spread the gospel across.

SPEAKER_01:

What's that now part of this long? 10,000, 10,000, 2600 something wrong.

SPEAKER_02:

I would want 10,000 miles.

SPEAKER_01:

I would want 10,000 more on the road. 25,600 minutes. That's what you're thinking of. Rumble.

SPEAKER_02:

Measure of you in daylight, in sunset. No, it's the office. Okay, so in podcasts, in Jordan White Coast.