Museum pilgrimage with a Wall Street missionary

Stephen Auth is executive vice president and a chief investment officer for Federated Global Equities. He has had a long career working on Wall Street and regularly appears in the media to discuss economic issues. He will be a featured speaker at this month’s Legatus Summit 2023 in Orlando, FL.

Auth is a member of Regnum Christi and is on the board of the Lumen Institute, a Catholic business leadership group he helped found in New York. He is involved in a number of apostolic activities, including leading a spiritual tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “Man’s Search for God: A History of Art through the Prism of Faith.” He explores themes from that tour in his 2022 book, Pilgrimage to the Museum: Man’s Search for God Through Art and Time.

He is also a street missionary in New York City as detailed in his 2019 book, The Missionary of Wall Street: From Managing Money to Saving Souls on the Streets of New York.

What will be your Summit topic?

I plan to talk about art and spirituality based on a pilgrimage you can take by going to an art museum. I will review how artists over the past 5,000 years have sought God through art and how art can bring us closer to God. I will be exploring some of the big themes and archetypes that occur over the centuries in great works of art and how they remain relevant in today’s quest for God.

We’ll look at works from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the medieval period, Baroque and Renaissance art, and through to the moderns. It is a journey through time that I find moves people and gets them to think more deeply about God and how we can draw closer to Him.

How did you get active in Regnum Christi?

Regnum Christi is a lay evangelist movement affiliated with the Legionaries of Christ. I was in the intensive care unit after experiencing heart failure, and I received Anointing of the Sick from a Legionaries priest. I made my first Confession in 30 years, and the priest concluded that I had a lot of talent but was using it for my own sake and not for God. I resolved to change that. I went on a mission to Mexico, saw in someone the face of Christ, and realized that I was called to be a missionary.

What do you do as a street evangelist?

I lead a group of missionaries, many of whom work on Wall Street, who engage people on the sidewalks of the city about their faith with the end goal of getting them back to Confession and into the life of the Church. In the time I’ve been a missionary we’ve reached out to 3 million people, about 200,000 of whom talk to us and about 20,000 of whom have come back to the Church through making their first Confession in many years.
 
Our lay missionaries set out in a matrix around Old St. Patrick’s and sometimes the new St. Patrick’s. They are easily identifiable in their T-shirts (and purple scarves during the winter) and arms full of rosaries.
 
They approach those who walk by as joyful witnesses of the faith. We try to encounter people where they are, and if they’ve been away from the Church, we gently suggest that they get back inside the Church and that things will go better for them if they do. It sounds crazy to some, but it can lead someone to go back to Confession for the first time in years.
 
I tell our missionaries that it was love and joy that converted the Roman Empire. People who don’t have it and see it are attracted by it.

JIM GRAVES is a contributing writer for Legatus magazine.