Al Kresta, who passed away this past Saturday, was known for his incandescent intellect and exceptional erudition, yet how he embraced the cross proved crucial in making him the renowned radio evangelist and apologist he became.
“Oh, yeah—he was brighter than git-out,” recalled his friend and colleague, Ray Guarendi, host of The Doctor Is In, in a show that paid tribute to Kresta days after his June 15 death, following a brief battle with liver cancer. “Incredibly well read. Matter of fact, one of the dangers with Al interviewing someone is that so often he knew more about the subject than the guest did.”
“But his soul was the thing that spoke,” Guarendi added, regarding the longtime host of Kresta in the Afternoon, which launched in 1997. His redemptive suffering “certainly expresses how God can take what seems to be the darkest moments of someone’s life, when Christianity is somewhere over the horizon somewhere, and you wonder whether it’s still even there for you. And God took it, and he shaped Al into being so much of who Al is, and into giving so much to each of us and to me personally.”
Al’s journey of redemptive suffering begin in the early 1980s and lasted until the spring of 1985, when he went on a life-changing retreat at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky—aptly named Gethsemani. Around twenty years later, in 2003, Kresta would lose a leg to flesh-eating bacteria. And yet, as he told journalist Marybeth Hicks, “what I went through in the mid-1980s was much, much worse.”
Kresta said he believes that God permitted his trial for discipline, to prune him into becoming a better disciple—and, in time, a beloved media missionary known throughout the English-speaking world. His self-described “arrogance” was such that, while serving as a manager for a chain of ten bookstores in the early 1980s, he declined to visit one of his co-workers who had attempted suicide.
“‘No, I’m not gonna go to the hospital. I’m not gonna reward that attention-seeking behavior,’” Kresta recalled telling former co-workers in his April 2024 interview with Guarendi. “So you can see that’s not a pastor’s heart.”
A year later, Kresta descended into clinical depression. Triggered by anesthesia he received in 1982 for a routine hernia surgery, Al experienced frightening flashbacks to his late-teen experiments with LSD. For three long years, including being hospitalized twice, Kresta struggled with whether God even existed and thus his own self-identity, as he had been gung-ho for Jesus since a conversion in college a decade earlier.
“My whole world is falling apart. Because everything I based my existence on is rattled,” Guarendi said to Kresta, summarizing what his radio host colleague had endured. “Badly rattled—kind of like, I hate to use the cliche, ‘existential conflict.’”
“But that is the right word,” Kresta replied, who credited his wife Sally and his children for seeing him through his crucible of faith.
In May 1985, after telling God he was on the verge of becoming a practical atheist who would support his family in some non-ministerial way, Kresta explained to Guarendi that he finally had a breakthrough on his retreat—through a series of dreams and also while meditating on Jesus’ agonizing words on the cross (Matt. 27:46): “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I heard those words for years. But all of a sudden, it dawned on me: “If the Son of God had a moment, where he appeared to be abandoned by God . . . [then] that’s part of the Christian story after all. . . . The apparent absence of God. That’s part of the Christian story. And that, that reawakened my faith. That the experience I’d gone through was not alien to the Christian narrative. The Christian story. It had a place in it.
This “baptism of suffering, I think,” Kresta added, “was a special work of the Holy Spirit that prepared me.”
Eventually, Al would return to his Catholic roots. For a number of years, he served as the afternoon radio host at WMUZ-FM, a Protestant radio station in Detroit. An interview he had with a Catholic priest in May 1990 was key in his journey home. He shared the experience with friends in April 1992, shortly after returning to full communion with the Church:
I’d had Fr. Peter Stravinskas on [the radio show], and during the course of some of his discussion, as he was describing the Mass as a re-presentation of Christ, I recognized the doctrine that I held in a diluted form. It was a doctrine that I used to call “memorial consciousness.” I used to teach that at Shalom: that past saving events could be re-presented in the present. The Jews tried to do it with Passover. The same thing with the Lord’s Supper. So when Fr. Peter said that, I had this rush of adrenaline while I was on the air, and I said to myself, “My God, I’m a Catholic.”
Kresta couldn’t escape the Faith’s divine foundation and historicity, as he later wrote in his foreword to my book, To Whom Shall We Go?: The Biblical Case for the Catholic Church:
The Church wasn’t an afterthought, a mere pragmatic association of Jesus people. Rather, Jesus, from the beginning, willed the Church to be the center of human history and the eucharistic sacrifice to be the center of ecclesial identity and worship.
While never nearly as intense as his ordeal of the 1980s, Kresta experienced periodic bouts with depression later on in life, and he used those crosses to further speak the truth in love, both on the air and in encouraging others who endured similar trials, including me.
“No shortcuts,” Al would say, noting how we must embrace our crosses to grow closer to the Lord and one another in Christ, similar to how Jesus counseled St. Paul, who wanted immediate relief from his “thorn . . . in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7–10). In the end, Kresta’s deep thinking, which contributed to his redemptive odyssey, enabled him to help so many others find their way—and the Way (John 14:6)—in life.
“I finally concluded that—later on when I found language for it—that human beings, just by nature, are meaning-seeking creatures,” he told Guarendi. “We want to find meaning. And, secondly, we can’t escape moral judgments. We’re always gonna do moral judgments.”
“I’ve never wanted to deter people from reaching out for help,” Kresta added. “What I’m not saying is, ‘Keep it to yourself.’ Reach out for help. Get help. But, remember, ultimately, there is only one Savior here. And you can get lots of help, lots of different people. But, for me, it took a work of God to get me back stable and oriented for my future.”