Nick Saban will headline a sold-out prayer breakfast in Irondale on Thursday, May 2, the National Day of Prayer.

Saban, who retired as head football coach at the University of Alabama in January, will speak at the City of Irondale’s fourth annual Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast, hosted by the Church of the Highlands on Grants Mill Road. Irondale Mayor James D. Stewart Jr. will be the presenter.

All individual tickets and sponsorships have been sold out.

Saban is a lifelong Catholic.

He and his wife, Terry, have been married more than 50 years and have been members of St. Francis University Parish in Tuscaloosa since 2007. They helped raised money to build a larger sanctuary in 2012.

The Sabans then raised $1.9 million to build the Saban Catholic Student Center next to St. Francis on campus, about two blocks from the football practice field. The center has study and recreation areas for students in a building next to the church.

At the dedication of the Saban Catholic Student Center, Saban reflected on being part of the parish.

“This has been something we really enjoyed being a part of,” Saban said. “It’s really important to us to be a part of this Catholic community here. This is a very wholesome environment, and Terry and I really look forward to it each and every Sunday. I love being a part of it.”

Saban’s mother, Mary, sat behind him at the dedication in 2016. Asked by AL.com afterward about her famous son, Mary Saban described Nick as a very devout child. “He used to be an altar boy,” she said. Anytime Saban noticed the priests needing assistance, he always offered to help during the Mass, she said.

Saban said he hoped the center would help students adjust to college life.

“I remember the first day when my parents left me off when I went away to school, and to have a place like this where I could have developed relationships with some quality people, and my faith, would have been very, very important to me,” he said.

“Discipline is all about: Here’s something that I know I’m supposed to do, that I really don’t want to do,” Saban said. “Can you make yourself do it? Then over here, there’s something that you know you’re not supposed to do, but you want to do it, can you keep yourself from it?”

Staying on that straight and narrow path is the key to discipline and morality, Saban said at the opening of the student center.

“So if you can sort of stay in that moral path, I think you make very good choices and decisions and will have a much better chance in your life of making the kind of choices that will help you be successful and give you the positive self-gratification that you need to have the confidence to do the type of things you’re capable of doing,” Saban said. “Hopefully this student center will offer everybody an opportunity to do that.”

Before Alabama beat then-No. 1 Notre Dame in the BCS National Championship game on Jan. 7, 2013, winning its second consecutive BCS title and third in four seasons, Saban talked about the intersection of his faith and football.

“Being a Catholic kid growing up, I always watched Notre Dame and everybody in my family was interested in what Notre Dame did,” Saban said.

“I think having faith is something that helps us all sort of keep our moral compass in the right direction,” Saban said.

“I think it reinforces a lot of things about being good, serving other people, trying to do the right things. So regardless of what your faith is, I think that would be of significance to who you are, and I think that is of significance to who I am or who I try to be, and why we do some of the things that we do, in terms of influencing our players to do the right things, to serve other people, to be compassionate, and to be all they can be. I think those are things that we try to emphasize with our players, we try to set an example for in terms of how we go about how we do what we do, and what we do.”