The Joy of Being Wrong: What Father Mike Schmitz's Conversion Reveals About Humility, Truth, and Hope

Father Mike Schmitz, whose Bible in a Year podcast has reached one billion downloads, told EWTN's Colm Flynn in Dublin in July 2026 that the turning point of his vocation was not a consolation but a collapse: "I would go to daily Mass and I would scoff the entire Mass. ... Whenever they would teach something, I'd be rolling my eyes ... No, that's just: 'The Church is wrong and I'm right.'"[^1] As reported by the National Catholic Register, he entered a seminar on Humanae Vitae already decided to refute every argument; "I sat down. I'm like, 'Bring it on. Let's go.'" By the end, something he did not expect had happened. He said, "I had this most incredible experience of the joy of being wrong, where I realized I was wrong this whole time."[^1]

The phrase, the joy of being wrong does not describe relief, or mere resignation, or the tactical retreat of someone who has run out of arguments. It describes an encounter with truth that arrives as gift rather than verdict, and that encounter has several distinct moments.

The weight that pride carries

Schmitz names what inspired his animosity without ambiguity: "My own pride — and that's what we're really going to talk about: Is it anyone else's fault? No. Is it my fault? Absolutely."[^1] Without humility and docility, intellectual surity is often a counterfeit for true wisdom and does not lead to truth, much less joy.

In the classical account of the virtues, docility is a component of prudence: the capacity to receive instruction and correct one's judgment in light of what is actually true rather than what one initially assumed. Docility is not passivity. It is the practiced readiness to let reality revise the self, which is exactly what pride forecloses. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argues that docility belongs especially to prudence because prudence governs action in particular circumstances, and no one accumulates sufficient experience to judge every circumstance from their own resources alone.[^2] Refuse instruction, and you have simply narrowed the range of truth available to you.

What gratitude reveals

When Schmitz's private certainty collapsed, what replaced it was not embarrassment. Gratitude came first: the recognition that something larger and truer had held the ground he could not hold himself. Embarrassment is self-referential; it is about how one appears. Gratitude is other-directed, requiring an acknowledged benefactor and a received good. The moment Schmitz could say "I was wrong this whole time" without the sentence caving in on him was the moment the correcting reality had been received as good rather than punishing.

Trust is the operative condition that allows correction to land as gift. Without it, being shown one's error produces defensiveness, not docility. Schmitz's own subsequent reckoning locates this honestly: "I knew what the sins are. ... But I need a Savior. Like, I need forgiveness. I can't give that to myself."[^1] The move from intellectual conversion to personal dependence on God was for Father the same motion continued. The will that admitted it was wrong about Humanae Vitae is the same will that admitted it could not earn its own redemption.

From self-made sadness to hope

There is a particular misery in defended wrongness. It requires organizing a significant portion of one's attention around protecting a position rather than receiving what is real. Schmitz's account of his Mass attendance — present in body, adversarial in spirit — describes that misery. The joy that arrived when his certainty broke was the joy of being freed from that labor.

The destination of the arc Father describes is named in a single deflecting phrase. Asked about his podcast's reach, he said: "I don't feel famous. Just remember who the real Star is."[^1] A self no longer positioned as the measure of every question is freed from the task of defending that position. What comes in its place is orientation toward something reliable. That reorientation, away from the self-made sadness of maintained error and toward a hope carried by truth one did not manufacture, is what Catholic Christian formation aims to make available to every person who will receive it.