“I didn’t want to be one of those people only to start giving at 70 so I started early.

You start and you start small, and then you keep doing it. Over time, you get smarter, because you make a lot of mistakes.”

“The only way to learn, I think... is just start.”

“Just because you do something good... doesn't mean you're free from all of the pitfalls of being human.”

“You see people doing something that seems so good—and doing it in such a bad or self-serving way... it’s upsetting.”

“It was not what was on my agenda… it just happened to be a good idea that I couldn’t kill.”

“So I was in my office, like a decade ago. I'm in my office, and my colleague, who was a very Catholic guy, came to me and said his buddy was running this Donor Advised Non-profit within the Archdiocese of New York that was going to get closed, but he thought that it should be saved.

I'm looking at the list of priorities that came up.

This is like, nowhere on the list of priorities. This is like, something I don’t want to do.

I take the meeting. I think it's a bad idea. He's got a board, and it's just a bit messy.

I ended up getting involved, and it ended up being like, one of the best things that happened to me.

They ended up getting merged into the Knights of Columbus and became a $200 million organization. And the whole thing, like, works particularly well after a lot of things happened.

“Just be open to really good ideas. God will sometimes give you opportunities that you didn’t even imagine.”

“Of all the things in my life, that’s the thing that’s changed me the most—it was God leading me to my wife and being open to life… It wasn’t really the plan I had, or my wife had, but it’s the plan God had.”

What is a Catholic religious order and a humanitarian group doing as a state?

And to be honest with you, when I asked this to my son, who is an advertising executive, he gave me a quick answer. He said:

‘You are the state that every citizen would want to be a member of. Why? Because you're not political, because you don't wage war, because you don't collect taxes—and because you try and be nice to everybody.’

And that’s essentially what we do at the United Nations.

We make frequent presentations to the General Assembly, to various committees, and to the Security Council—which we’ve addressed six times in the past 18 months.

Our neutrality, however, doesn’t prevent us from advocating—in fact, it empowers us to do so. We advocate for those who are dispossessed. That’s our job. We speak for those who suffer because of war, for those who are victims in an increasingly cruel world—human trafficking, children and adults caught in conflict, the hungry, the unloved, the unwanted.

These are the forgotten people of the planet. And the Order of Malta is committed to being their voice at the United Nations—and working with governments around the world to ensure their needs are heard.

We are inspired in our mission by the Gospels, by Catholic Social Teaching, and we reach out to all men and women of goodwill to try and live according to the Beatitudes of Jesus—which are represented by the eight points of the cross of Malta.