PEOPLE

Peter Lemieux stepped into the breach more than 30 years ago and never looked back. His wife, Cynthia, has been beside him the whole way. That’s because decades before Bishop Olmsted issued his “Into the Breach” apostolic exhortation, Lemieux knew men needed training to become strong, spiritual husbands and fathers.

“Who died beside Jesus, one to the left and one to the right? Prisoners." "“The difference between you and me is that you got caught," a prison volunteer tells inmates.

Dr. Michael Rock has been standing in the breach for decades, defending the unborn and fighting to protect the lives of the elderly and infirm. He recently received the Guardian of Faith award from the National Catholic Medical Association, an organization he’s been active in for years and was president of in the late 1990s.

Tan Duong was 6 years old when his parents put him and his two sisters into a small boat headed for America in order to escape life under Vietnam’s communist regime. The youngest of 11 children, Tan remembers being out on the open sea, facing armed pirates.

“In jiu-jitsu, if you give of yourself to make others stronger, you become strong," Melissa Veselovsky said. Being strong in spirit inspires you to give back, she said.

20-year-old Adrián Inclán is among the youngest to publicly answer his bishop's call for men to engage in spiritual battle by stepping into the breach.

Gonzalez spearheads a growing army of 150 volunteers who broke the chains of addiction in their own lives and families and now feed the homeless in downtown Phoenix with similar hope.

Patty Chesebrough gazes inside the darkened church and stares up at a portrait of the late Fr. John Hanley, the priest who showed her God’s mercy in her darkest hour. It was 1990 and Chesebrough’s husband was pressuring her to have an abortion. She called her parish, St. Theresa at the time, and asked to speak with a priest.

"We treated him with love throughout, even when he wasn’t loving back. That sticks. That is the breach and that is the way it works," Tony Rizzo said.

Carolee O’Meara knows what it’s like to be poor. She also knows how it feels to receive mercy. “I’ve always had a heart for the poor,” O’Meara said as she deftly stashed cans of vegetables in food boxes at Paz de Cristo in Mesa. “Being raised in a home where there was poverty and where God was just there all the time leading me, even without the parental guidance, God was just always merciful to keep me close to Him.”