Our Team
Our team is made up of devout Catholics working on a volunteer basis to build leadership development courses and experiences to forge courageous Catholic leaders. If you feel called to join our efforts, we would love to meet you and add you to our team.
Louis Tobergte
Louis Tobergte is the 3rd of 7 children from a large Catholic family in Northern Kentucky. As a child, he dreamt of being a priest or a Marine, but God had a different plan, and he graduated West Point in 2014, serving first as an Engineer Officer and then as a Special Forces Officer. After seeing up-close the amount of time and resources that the military spends on leader development, he started asking priests he knew about the Catholic Church’s approach to leader development. After many questions, lots of soul-searching, great spiritual direction and support from mentors, he took a leap of faith and started the Saint Sebastian Institute to build leadership development courses for priests. Louis met his wife Jess while they were cadets, and Jess valiantly homeschools their 6 children while supporting SSI as much as she can.
Favorite Saint: St. Philip Neri | Patron Saint of the Green Berets
Founder and Executive Director
Mike Erwin is a decorated Army officer, social entrepreneur, and leadership expert dedicated to strengthening character and relationships. A 2002 graduate of West Point, he served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Cavalry Division and 3rd Special Forces Group, earning two Bronze Star Medals. He later earned a master’s degree in positive psychology from the University of Michigan, where he founded Team Red, White & Blue, now a 300,000-member veteran wellness community. Mike is the founder and CEO of The Character & Leadership Center, co-author of Lead Yourself First and Leadership Is a Relationship, and co-founder of The Positivity Project, which serves over 525,000 students nationwide. He continues to serve as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves and lives outside Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with his wife and five children.
Chairman of the Board and Leadership Expert
Mike Erwin
Father Paul-Anthony Halladay
Chaplain (Major), US Army (Retired)
Chaplain, Instructor and Leadership Coach
Father Paul-Anthony Hallladay grew up in Alabama and attended Spring Hill College. After graduation, he served in the Peace Corps in the Caribbean before entering the seminary. After studying at Saint Joseph Seminary College In Louisiana and the Pontificia Università Gregoriana in Rome, Father Halladay was ordained to the Priesthood in 2000. After four years as a Diocesan Priest, Father Halladay entered Active Duty as a US Army Chaplain in 2004. He served for 20 years all over the world, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and Combat Action Badge. After retiring from Active Duty, Father Halladay briefly served as the Associate Director of the Propaedeutic Program at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, CA., before accepting the position of Vocations Director for the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA.
Ben lives in Villa Hills, KY with his wife, Alex, their son, William, and two dogs. A former D1 high jumper and Army Reservist serving as both a Military Intelligence and Civil Affairs Officer, he later became a CPA and Certified Exit Planning Advisor, building a decade-long career in accounting and finance before stepping into the role of CFO at his family’s industrial electrical contracting business. Raised serving with St. Vincent de Paul and organizing his parish food pantry, Ben continues his commitment to the vulnerable through annual mission trips with Mustard Seed Communities. After years of discerning God’s will, he recognized a clear call to join his cousin and longtime friend in launching the Saint Sebastian Institute.
Favorite Saint: St. Jude | Patron Saint of Impossible Causes
Board Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer
Benjamin V. Bessler, CPA
Richard (Scott) McCabe grew up as a cradle Catholic and an Army brat. He spent time in his carefree youth playing the drums, and during late high school, Scott realized he wanted to serve his country in the Army because of its emphasis on human challenges and leadership. After graduating from West Point, he pursued a career as an Infantry Officer and then as a Green Beret, with service in 3rd Special Forces Group. He concluded ten years of uniformed service, and when Louie told him of his efforts with Saint Sebastian Institute, he wanted in.
Favorite Saint: St. Philip Neri, for his ability to bring the best out of people.
Leadership Coach and Scenario Developer
Scott McCabe
LTC (Ret) Daniel Pace
Instructor and Curriculum Designer
Dan Pace is an author and retired Green Beret with five children and a wife of twenty-five years. After a misbegotten and largely wasted youth, Dan joined the Army and spent 22 years learning hard lessons about life, leadership, and the ethics of war. Since retirement, he’s refocused his life on sharing what he learned with others and ideally saving them a bit of pain in the process.
His published works include Grey Zone Ethics, It Was What It Was: A Tale of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, and The Whale and The Kraken.
Favorite (and Patron) Saint: St. Augustine of Hippo
COL(Ret) Sean Berg served a long and distinguished career in infantry, Ranger and Special Forces units, where he commanded from Detachment to Brigade. He commanded over 4,000 soldiers in combat over all his deployments, and he brought every soldier home. After retirement, he started his own Executive and Leadership Coaching firm, Quiet Force Leadership, LLC. In the coming months, he will be ordained as a deacon in the Diocese of Honolulu. He and his wife Ann have 3 children and reside happily in Kailua, Hawai’i. Sean volunteers as a keynote speaker and instructor for select Saint Sebastian Institute events.
Instructor, Keynote Speaker, and Leadership Coach
Colonel (Retired) Sean Berg
Warren Henderson
Warren grew up in New Hampshire and graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2009 on an Army ROTC scholarship, commissioning as an Armor Officer. After Ranger School, he served at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in key platoon leadership roles, including an Afghanistan deployment in 2012, later transitioning to Military Intelligence where he commanded a Brigade MI Company with the 101st Airborne Division and served with Special Operations Command Korea and the Joint Readiness Training Center. Selected for promotion to Major, he instead pursued an MBA at Boston College in 2021. He later worked with Johnson & Johnson and InSight Recovery & Wellness, and then was part of the launch of the Saint Sebastian Institute, helping build the organization from the ground up. He now volunteers as an instructor and leadership coach.
Instructor and Leadership Coach
Teresa Messineo
Teresa Messineo is an international best selling author who spent seven years researching The Fire by Night (HarperCollins), her historical fiction novel about frontline military nurses of the Second World War. She quickly followed with two more books in that trilogy, What We May Become (Severn House) set in Tuscany during WWII, and The Easiest Burden to Carry, which takes place in exotic Macau; the film rights for all three works are currently being marketed worldwide. Teresa earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Publishing (MFA-CW), the highest degree in its field, from DeSales University; taught in Drexel University’s prestigious graduate programs; worked in corporate administration; and home schooled her four children for 20 years. Teresa and her husband, Paul, both devout Catholics, happily reside in Amish country in rural Pennsylvania.
Favorite (and Patron) Saint: Teresa of Avila and St. John the Evangelist
Operations Manager