Actor Gilyard finds Catholicism is role for a lifetime

"Why I got to do 13 straight years of network television and somebody else didn’t, who knows?" Gilyard mused in an interview June 2 with Catholic News Service in Washington.

What’s less well-known about Gilyard is that he’s Catholic. It has been a 10-year run since he joined the Church and it shows no signs of cancellation.

He was in town to attend meetings of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Communications, on which he serves as a consultant.

Gilyard, originally a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, said his journey to Catholicism came as the result of the breakup of his first marriage. "I went through a serious divorce that brought me to my knees. I had to think on all aspects of my life," he said, speaking in quiet, measured tones.

"Someone took me to Mass, and I looked anew at life at that time, and I felt at home — immediately. Not long after that I started praying the rosary, too. The man who brought me to Mass essentially taught me to pray the rosary. And praying it was hard," Gilyard recalled.

He noted, though, that praying the rosary isn’t restricted just to him — his family members pray it — or to saying it only in troubled times. "We’re back to praying it now in our family — a lot," said Gilyard, who is married and has three children. "(The Virgin) Mary knows how to teach."

Gilyard, whose home is Texas, has been on a sabbatical from TV and movie acting so he could pursue a master’s degree in classical theater at Southern Methodist University. "I’m about twice the age of my fellow students," said Gilyard, who will celebrate his 50th birthday on Christmas Eve this year. "I really have to work hard to keep up with them."

The discipline has helped him as a consultant to the bishops’ communications committee, on which he has served for about three years. "I missed the last meeting" in January, Gilyard said, so to prepare for the May 31-June 2 meeting, "I really had to do my homework."

He got the consultant’s post based on his friendship with Bishop Joseph A. Galante of Camden, N.J. He attended the episocpal ordination of Bishop Galante when he became coadjutor for the Dallas Diocese in 1999, Gilyard told CNS. "We had struck up a relationship when I met him." Bishop Galante has headed the Camden Diocese since 2004.

When Bishop Galante assumed the chairmanship of the communications committee, he asked Gilyard to be a consultant; of the committee’s 10 current consultants, he is the only one who works in show business.

Gilyard, who was wearing a "Jubilee 2000" golf shirt under his blazer, does not wear the cowboy hat that was part and parcel of his role as Jimmy Trivette on the TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger." He said he often grows a beard when not on a film or TV project. Still, he said, "if people look at you in an elevator long enough, they’ll recognize you."

But he is more than just a character, he said. He sees himself "as a Catholic Christian," he explained. "People don’t necessarily want to see you in that way," nor do they see him, he added, "as a person, as a father," as someone "called to marriage" or "as an artist."

In the practice of his faith, Gilyard said he and his family plan their vacations around "the liturgical year and the Catholic culture that the world is trying to forget." This year’s vacation will take the Gilyards to Cologne, Germany, for World Youth Day, as well as to Rome and Florence, Italy.

He will be in a new "Walker, Texas Ranger" TV movie, but producers had to rewrite the script to accommodate Gilyard’s vacation so that he could still appear in the film. But Gilyard turned down reprising his role as Pastor Bruce Barnes for a third "Left Behind" movie.

"That made Bishop Galante really happy," he said with a laugh. The movies stress a fundamentalist theology of the end times seen as being in conflict with Catholic teaching.

But taking the Barnes role had some important elements for Gilyard.

"I took the character because of the character," he said. "Not just because of his being clergy, but the predicament he faces ... the struggle of the individual, and that’s putting it lightly.