America's Largest Catholic Newspaper
The way Tom Leopold tells the story, the first time he prayed, really prayed, was just a few years ago. He and his wife and their older daughter were in Arizona at Christmastime visiting the couple’s younger daughter, then struggling with a life-threatening eating disorder. She was in a hospital for treatment.
Problem was, all Leopold said he knew about praying at that point was from Westerns on television, and he didn’t want his prayer to sound like an old cowboy lamenting his lack of faith. It was a serious time in his life, when he felt very close to the breaking point.
So he simply began by asking a question. “Lord, can you give me a sign? I can’t make it alone,” he said in an interview the week after he received a special Christopher Spirit Award at the annual Christopher Awards ceremony May 15.
The next morning, he got the sign he was seeking. It rode up on an old motorcycle in the form of an ex-Marine, who said his name was Shepherd and that his wife brought him to Jesus at age 33, the same age Christ was when he was crucified. Before he drove away into the desert, the man said, “God is watching you.”
If it sounds like a Hollywood moment, it is what you might expect from Leopold. The 64-year-old has been involved in show business, first as an actor and now as a comedy writer, for decades. He’s written for many of the most popular shows in TV history, including “Cheers,” “Seinfeld” and “Will and Grace.”
That first experience in the Arizona desert set Leopold on a course that would change his life for the better. When he was back home in New York and still searching for answers, he made an appointment to visit a psychic that he had first met decades ago.
That same day, as he was standing on Mulberry Street near the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in lower Manhattan, out of a black car stepped Father Jonathan Morris, newly assigned to the parish. Leopold had just been reading the priest’s book, “The Promise: God’s Promise and Plan for When Life Hurts.”
Leopold, then a non-observant Jew, said he had never before spoken to a man of God. When Leopold asked if it would be possible for them to chat sometime in the near future, Father Morris told him he could always find him at the church they were standing before.
Leopold did look up Father Morris, and the priest in turn did lead him to what he had desperately been seeking. Saying that priest’s total acceptance of “the reality of God as a foregone conclusion” made him want to take a deeper look at Catholicism.
“It was like a bell rang,” Leopold said. “This is home.”
As he went through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults instruction in the faith, Leopold said he found the more he studied, the more “it was like my whole life was pointing toward it.”
He entered the Church at the Easter Vigil in 2011, but not before his show business pals, led by his best friend “Late Night With David Letterman” bandleader Paul Shaffer, threw him a “Tom Leopold’s Absolutely Last Day as a Jew” party in the form of a celebrity roast at Sammy’s Romanian restaurant.
At the outset, Shaffer drew roars with the line, “Does Tom Leopold know how to abandon his people, or what?”
Turns out that Leopold was not abandoning his Hollywood friends or his writing career. He has brought his writing skills to bear on a one-man show, “A Comedy Writer Finds God: My Journey to Faith, One Laugh at a Time,” which he has performed at a number of churches, including St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.
Initially, he was worried about how it would be received—“I didn’t want to get kicked out of the Catholics so soon,” he quipped—but both Msgr. Donald Sakano, pastor of St. Patrick’s, and Father Morris assured him he had nothing to be anxious about.
The show explores his journey to faith through stories both humorous and heartfelt. In fact, he said, the laughs fall in the same places no matter where the show plays.
Some parts touch on how he and his family dealt, painfully at times, with his daughter’s illness. Thankfully, Augusta, or Gussie as she is known, is now in much better health and planning to enter college in the fall, he said. In a surprise orchestrated by Father Morris, Gussie was the one who presented him with the special Christopher honor.
“I want to show how a regular guy can come to faith—a funny, Hollywood guy, who’s not cynical. How it’s right there for everybody. If I can find it…if God has room for me…He’s there to help us carry our incredible burdens.”
Another avenue where Leopold gets an opportunity to explore his newfound Catholicism is his weekly show, “Entertaining Truth,” on The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM, where Father Morris also happens to be program director. Leopold hosts the show along with Father Leo Patalinghug, a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
When the show began, Leopold was concerned because he had only been “a Catholic for like two hours.”
Father Morris reassured him that was not a problem, but rather part of the attraction. “That’s what I like,” the priest said. “Don’t pretend to know more than you do.”
