By John Rohlf
The Message assistant editor
Diocesan Director of Vocations Father Tyler Tenbarge thinks his new book, “The Savio Project: Four Weeks to Become a Saint,” will “only allow all the ministry we do to find another way for it to grow deeper.”
Father Tenbarge said back in the summer of 2025, he made it his goal to write a book about the life of St. Dominic Savio. While he finished the book at the end of the summer of 2025, he did not believe this was the book that was going to be helpful. In the fall of 2025, the challenge of the young men in the Savio apostolate in the Diocese of Evansville to know St. Dominic Savio and having a mentorship came back to him in the fall semester as Savio restarted again.
“Over Christmas break, I realized this would be a perfect marriage of that book idea that I’d already kind of processed mentally,” Father Tenbarge said. “And also this challenge we had that needed to be solved.”
Father Tenbarge said he wrote this book in about two weeks, although much of the data he already had filtered through his own head. It was an evolution of seeing the need, synthesizing Savio’s life, seeing the need again, realizing it and then creating the book, Father Tenbarge said.
The Savio Project is a 28-day project where a young man does spiritual reading, holiness challenges and fraternity groups.
“If you do the reading, you’ll learn who you need to be and where you need to grow to,” Father Tenbarge said. “Do the holiness challenges to practice virtue over the course of four weeks straight, which will help you actually grow and solidify the habits. And the fraternity group gets you the mentors and brothers so you know you’re not doing this alone. Those are the three things it’s trying to build on.”
Father Tenbarge said Savio was founded in 2018 as an event based program. He said over the years as Savio has grown over time in size and number of attendees, the ability for each young man to both know who St. Dominic Savio is and for each of them to have a strong relationship with a mentor has diminished because of the size of the group.
“In an effort to recapture that, I was looking for a way to get our mentors and priests in a more direct relationship with working with each young man or in a smaller group, and also to introduce them more deeply to who Dominic Savio is,” he said.
Father Tenbarge said as the Savio apostolate has expanded, there is a desire for uniformity amongst the participants and among the leaders. They want to be a part of something that is bigger than themselves, he said.
“They don’t want to be given an open book and say create your own program,” Father Tenbarge said. “They want to say I’m going to be a part of something that we know works. And so this will actually help with common sense language and values, our promises, our motto, our mission, the stories of St. Dominic Savio that we tell that are in the book, the challenges the guys do on their own to live the promises.”
The Savio apostolate has proven to be effective, Father Tenbarge said, with guys’ lives changing. Parishes, pastors and teachers are seeing that families are changing. The young men in Savio know that they are growing in holiness, fighting against sin, growing in virtue, finding their vocation and following it.
“I hope the Savio Project, which is the book, I think that it will only allow all the ministry we do to find another way for it to go deeper,” Father Tenbarge said.
According to the book, the “Savio Project: Four Weeks To Become a Saint” is for young men who are ready to deepen their faith, either alone or with others. It is also for a priest searching for a way to accompany young men as disciples and discerners, a youth minister resolved to build relationships among guys in his group, a Theology teacher seeking to build relationships with students in a new semester and a dad hoping to challenge and bond with his son during Lent.
To order the book or to learn more about the book, visit https://bit.ly/4cRP5nm.