The Future of Catholic Media

Msgr James Shea:
Well, good evening, everybody. It’s just a little bit after 9. The four of us were praying for a crowd that’s all liquored up, and so it looks like we got the right one here.

I’m really honored to be able to moderate this panel tonight with our distinguished guests, discussing the future of Catholic media.

We’re joined by Michael Warsaw. Michael is the Chairman and CEO of EWTN—the Eternal Word Television Network. He joined EWTN in 1991 and worked for many years hand-in-glove, side-by-side with the great and late Mother Angelica, whom we all miss very much. He’s done great work expanding EWTN’s market in every direction. In 2017, Pope Francis named him to the Dicastery on Communication.

Let’s welcome Michael Warsaw.

He’s joined tonight by EWTN’s Chief Digital Officer, Sean Graber. Shan went to UVA and has master’s degrees from Dartmouth and from Valencia in Spain. He’s worked in many different places and has had a distinguished career. Now, he’s taking EWTN into the digital age.

Let’s hear it for Sean.

Finally, we’ve got Alexander Danto, co-founder of Hallow. Alexander went to Notre Dame, where he graduated summa cum laude. Notre Dame used to be the Blessed Mother’s favorite university. He worked at a little startup called Goldman Sachs for a while, then got bored by the low pay there and left to found Hallow.

Msgr. Shea Shares a Personal Story

I told the group beforehand that I have a self-indulgent story to tie it all together and to help make sense of the fact that they asked me to moderate this panel—which is a choice beyond my own comprehension.

One of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me is this: after Mother Angelica died, Michael Warsaw invited me to her funeral. That was very touching to me. I didn’t know Mother, but of course I was a great admirer and was so mindful of all the good she had done for the world and for the Church—her courage, right? She had just tremendous courage.

I was also touched because my seminary classmate, Raymond Arroyo, writes for the National Catholic Register—an EWTN property—so he’s an adjunct employee. But he received a message from Michael Warsaw saying:

“Don’t come. There’s not room for you.”

So I was doubly delighted by this.

Anyway, what ended up happening is that I went down with Kathryn Jean Lopez, the online editor for National Review. Kathryn and I were classmates at the Catholic University of America. We each had a room at the Holiday Inn—not where the fancy people were staying; you were all at the Sheraton.

Kathryn and I Ubered over to the Sheraton where the great big motorcades to go out to Irondale—well, not Irondale, but to the Shrine—were leaving from. I told Michael at that point how touched and moved I was by the invitation, and he said one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

I think I’ve shared it with you before; if I haven’t, I’ll share it now in front of everyone. I said:

“I can’t believe you invited me to this. The University of Mary is just a small place in North Dakota, in the kind of blank space of the nation’s consciousness.”

And Michael said:

“Mother Angelica always had her eyes on the horizon. She always saw what was happening. And it’s getting to the point—” and this was too much, but it was so nice—
“It’s getting to the point where you can’t have a major Catholic event in the United States without the University of Mary being there. And Mother would’ve known that. She would’ve wanted you here.”

I was so touched by that, Michael. I was very grateful.

The night after the funeral, Kathryn got a call from Raymond Arroyo, who works for EWTN, and he invited us to dinner. So we went out to dinner. At the table it was me, Kathryn, Raymond, and Jim Caviezel—who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.

Jim was in a mood. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him, but he is a super intense human being—like super, super intense. And he was extra special intense that night. He was also mad about something in the Church and decided it would be good to take out his anger on the first priest he saw.

That priest was me.

It was a very uncomfortable dinner. Kathryn and Raymond promptly abandoned me and spent the whole night having a private conversation, while Jim and I… I don’t remember anything about the night. I’ve been in counseling for years because of the whole thing.

I mean, to be attacked by Jesus like that was quite extraordinary.

EWTN and Hallow

So last month—I’m not making this up—I looked at my calendar, and I saw that Hallow was flying Kevin Cotter up to do recordings with me on Witness to Hope. They’re doing this challenge right now on the Hallow app about Pope St. John Paul II, and they wanted me to read passages from George Weigel’s magisterial biography of John Paul II.

So I said okay, we’ll do it. It was a long day of recording. We talked all about it. Then they said to me:

“You’re doing the biographical parts, but the person who’s reading all the writings from John Paul II is Jim Caviezel.”

I said:

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You have got to be kidding me.”

So right now on the Hallow app, I am co-starring with Jim Caviezel, who once nearly assaulted me in a restaurant—on the night of Mother Angelica’s funeral.

So I’m just so happy to be joined by all these people. I’m also happy to bring together, in my very person, EWTN and Hallow.

What’s interesting—and maybe the reason all of you came—is that EWTN is this legacy provider of Catholic content. The story of Mother Angelica, her courage, and the growth of EWTN is extraordinary.

Hallow, on the other hand, is on the cutting edge. They’re the cool, hip new arrival on the Catholic scene.

I think we’re all interested in hearing from these leaders in Catholic media about where things are going in terms of reaching people with the Gospel.

Let’s start with Michael Warsaw. Michael, why don’t you just say a word, if you’re willing, about your relationship with Mother Angelica—what you learned from her—and where you see us today. What space are we in at this moment?

Michael Warsaw:
Sure. Happy to, Father.

I was just thinking, as you were telling your Jim Caviezel story from the funeral, I have a Jim Caviezel story from the funeral too.

I was standing alongside Mother Angelica’s casket in the church. Jim came in. I welcomed him and told him how grateful I was that he was there. And he said:

“Yes, thank you. Where is the restroom?”

So anyway, I think you probably fared worse than I did.

Yeah… in a way, I feel like I’m the “old media guy” or the representative of old media here.

Moderator:
Nobody said dinosaur. Nobody said that word.

Michael Warsaw:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah—thanks for just throwing that out there. Did anybody say dinosaur? Nobody said it. No, no. Nice, nice, nice.

Msgr. Shea:
All right, Tim. Settle down.

Michael Warsaw:
Yeah, I’m having an existential crisis as it is. There was a day when I used to be the youngest guy in the room—the youngest guy at the table. That’s not the case anymore.

Michael Warsaw’s Work with Mother Angelica

Anyway, I was blessed for many, many years to be able to work alongside Mother Angelica. I joined EWTN 34 years ago—almost 35 years ago—when EWTN was just one channel, 24 hours a day, in the old cable days.

I’ve seen it, participated in it, and led the network over these many years.

We’ve come a long way from that. Today, we are the largest religious media organization in the world.

We operate 10 global satellite networks in multiple languages, 26 regional television channels in places like Ukraine—we have a Ukrainian channel, a Polish channel, a Hungarian channel. We actually have a Norwegian channel—there are only 50,000 Catholics in Norway, but they have a channel just for them.

We have services throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. We do linear radio and operate hundreds of television and radio stations globally. We still operate a shortwave radio station, which is critically important in places like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, where the Church has been forced out of public media.

We were—back in 1995…

Were you guys born in 1995?

Okay… okay…

Father, Msgr. wasn’t.

Msgr Shea:
No, I was in college.

Michael Warsaw:
In 1995, EWTN launched EWTN.com. We were one of—not just the first Catholic entities in the world to have a website…

We’re ahead of the Holy See. We’re ahead of everybody. We had a website in 1995. We were one of the first organizations globally to actually have a worldwide website. So, we’ve been in the digital space since literally the very beginning.

Every year—while people don’t think of us as being, you know, what was it—hip and new, or whatever you were talking about there,
we’ve been in the digital space since the beginning. We were at the beginning of social media. We’ve had a play in all of that since the very beginning.

You know, we have, I think in the last year, something like 600 million video views, 6 billion social media impressions.
I mean—we’re definitely in that space.

At the same time, we also still continue to print the National Catholic Register newspaper. You know—there we go. Hey, Register fans out there! Good—you get an extra six-month subscription.

Oh—it’s Montse—oh, okay. All right.

But I think, to go back to Mother—
She was a pioneer.
She is officially declared and recognized as a pioneer of the cable television industry in America.

And Mother Angelica was very, very clear about the fact that
whatever technology, whatever platform, whatever way in which the Gospel could be proclaimed was something that EWTN should embrace.

She did that initially by cable television at a time when cable was just beginning. EWTN launched two weeks after MTV. And we are older than almost all of the basic cable television channels in the United States.

Whether that’s Discovery, USA—There are very few that are actually older than EWTN. We are original pioneering players in that space, thanks to Mother Angelica’s vision, thanks to her wisdom, thanks to the grace of God who called her to do that work.

And so, throughout those years that I had at Mother’s side—
which were the last 10 active years of her life, the last 10 active years that she had at EWTN—I was blessed to be able to be the guy that got the call:

“Sweetheart, I’d really like to launch in Africa. What do you think about that?”
“Okay, yeah, we can make that happen, Mother.”
“Well sweetheart, what do you think about doing this project in the Philippines?”
“Okay, Mother, yeah—we can make that happen.”

It was an extraordinary experience for me to be alongside someone who was at once an incredible entrepreneur, an incredible business leader—She had incredible gifts of business leadership and business acumen—but also who was saintly.

Who—I believe—I’m biased maybe—but who I believe will be one day declared a saint of the Church.

Msgr. Shea:
I love that she called you “sweetheart.” I think that’s wonderful.

Michael Warsaw:
She would have called you “sweetheart” too.
Oh—it wasn’t always a good thing to have Mother call you and say,
“Hello sweetheart…”

Msgr. Shea:
Michael, why was she able to do it and the bishops couldn’t?
In other words—what’s the entrepreneurial aspect?
How’d she get into that space without any of the official channels of influence?

When the Lord Calls Us

Michael Warsaw:
One word: God.

God called her to do the work. This is what she said—God called her to do this work. Not the bishops, not others.

So I think she believed—and I think it is true—that she was able to succeed where the bishops, despite all their influence, despite pouring $30 to $40 million into their own network at the same exact time she was doing her thing, without any support from the bishops—I think it’s because God called her to do the work, not them.

I shared this at lunch today—and there are some people here who were at the lunch EWTN held earlier today. Mother shared one time that she was in prayer and she said to our Lord: “Lord, why me?”

And we can all relate to that.
How many times have any of us said, “Lord, why me?” “Why me? Why am I doing this?”

She said the answer she got back in prayer was that God said to her:
“Angelica, you were not the first. In fact, there were several others I called before you. You were the first who said yes.”

And I ponder that. I meditate on that often. Because I think for all of us—whether it’s being called to start a global media network, or in whatever ways we’re called by God—we have to say yes. We have to accept that.

And from that—as she would have said—she dared to do the ridiculous, and God accomplished the miraculous through that.

She did what, in the eyes of the secular media world, in the eyes—to your point—of the bishops and the institutional Church, they all looked at her and said:

“This is a cloistered nun in Birmingham, Alabama—not exactly the Catholic capital of the world, if anybody didn’t notice—but this cloistered nun in Birmingham, Alabama who’s in a garage with $200 in the bank, 12 nuns, some sheep and goats wandering around the property—not a Harvard Business School pitch deck for success…”

But she succeeded, because God had called her to do that work.

Msgr. Shea:
No, that’s great.

Sean, I want you to speak freely. If you get fired, then I might have a job for you—I’m not sure.

But tell me about the friction, or the tension, or what it takes to be Chief Digital Officer at an organization which is a legacy Catholic media conglomerate.

You’re needing constantly to push things.

Derry is here tonight from John Paul the Great Catholic University. I’m at the University of Mary—we were founded in 1959. JP the Great is a place founded for digital production, those kinds of things.

A smaller startup—a place like Hallow—is able to be pretty agile. Whereas it’s a whole different thing—I’m speaking from experience— to enact change in the midst of a place where things have been very entrepreneurial, as Michael said, but the digital world is the new frontier.

Tell us about that. Speak boldly.

Catholic Media Reaching Audiences and Building Trust

Sean Graber:
It is a great question. I think in a lot of ways, the legacy that you’re talking about is a strength more than it is a hindrance.

EWTN, over the past 40+ years, has built this extraordinary brand.
It’s built trust with its audience—and that is so difficult to replicate,
especially in this day and age, when we see in the media—in the news media in particular—a tremendous distrust of these institutions.

Msgr. Shea (playfully):
I heard that you said there’s a distrust for mon—what was—wasn’t my grammar? Laughter.

Sean Graber:
She’s here!
But we are able to take that trust, take that legacy, and use it to reach our audience. We have these 40 years of content.

What’s so incredible is—you take Mother Angelica, who, when you watch her show a lot of times, it’s in black and white. She’s sitting in front of a camera, it’s got the intro that looks like it’s from the ‘70s or ‘80s—And that resonates on platforms like TikTok.

We’re repurposing that, short cuts—and the reason it resonates is her authenticity.

She’s so real. She transcends time and space and is able to connect with this generation of people that didn’t know her—that might not know the Church particularly well.

So I do think it’s a tremendous strength that we have this legacy.

One of the things that I was—maybe not surprised about—but so excited about, just through the interview process…I’ve only been at EWTN for a couple months now, so it’s all quite new to me. But I did have this perception going in—and, you know, having worked at places like TripAdvisor that confronted these same types of issues—
you know, these storied brands that struggle with gaining relevance among a newer audience, a younger audience…

I understood inherently how this would be—or at least I thought I did.

What I found when I started talking to people—you think about our team in the Philippines, our teams in Europe—tremendous amount of entrepreneurial energy: building new apps, launching streaming services…There was just so much energy being unleashed in various places.

But really needed, perhaps, a little bit more focus—to truly bring the power of that to bear on the situation.

Mother Angelica’s Legacy

So, I see it as a huge benefit—the legacy that we have. I see the work, hopefully, as a continuation of Mother’s legacy.

She was the original innovator—I couldn’t put it more eloquently than you did, Michael.

All the work that she did to use these new media to bring a new audience to Christ, to bring her message to the world—I think what we’re doing is a continuation of that.

We were talking earlier—I think if Mother were here now, she would be taking advantage of these means of communication, hopefully similarly to the way that we are…um, and so there’s a lot of opportunity to invent new things. And, you know, Peter is somewhere here making all this amazing new content that complements what we have. But fundamentally, it’s the same thing.

Maybe one more thing I’ll say before, you know, passing it back is the opportunity that we have here with digital media. You know, TV and radio are wonderful—it’s a one-to-many kind of thing. With digital, we really have the opportunity to meet people where they are. And I think we’re coining this term of, you know, “digital pastoral accompaniment.”

We can use algorithms and recommendations to give folks—the audience—the right piece of content at the right time, that aligns with where they are in their faith life, where they are in their life journey: if they have children, if they don’t. That’s something that’s very difficult, if not impossible, to do in linear media.

And so it’s not a replacement, but it’s a complement. And what’s great is that we have this tremendous library of content—again, still very relevant, especially Mother’s content—that we can repurpose and make available anytime. And when you pair that with the great creative work that’s going on now, whether it’s in-house work that we’re doing or amazing partnerships—I mean, there’s so many amazing people here that we’re getting to work with as EWTN—we’re not always creating that content, but we can be a facilitator.

We can integrate, we can bring people together, even give them the means to create. You know, we’re building on that legacy, and I think it’s just tremendously exciting. And, you know, hopefully we’re making Mother proud here with the work that we’re doing.

Msgr. Shea:
You know, it’s interesting—Mother Angelica does have that timeless quality, like a Fulton Sheen has that as well. And that authenticity is great, especially when you’re talking about the digital media—the individual digital accompaniment, the phrase that you used.

I am interested, though—the use of those algorithms and the sort of behind-the-scenes work of digital media—is there consideration to how all of that data is used, which is particular in a Catholic context? Or is it the same? Are you just thinking about it the same way that Instagram does?

Sean Graber:
Well, I’m personally very privacy-focused in the way that I think about things. So I don’t think I’m personally thinking about it in the way that Instagram might be.

Host:
Is that fueled by your faith, your Catholic convictions? Or are you just… skittish? Maybe skeptical?

Sean Graber:
I think a little bit of both. I mean, I do think that, you know, there is a sensitivity, certainly, around some of these things. You know, we’ve seen a lot of scary things with organizations targeting people of faith. So we do need to be careful about that.

I think we can do this in a privacy-forward way. But the underpinnings are similar in that, you know, we see what people like and we can recommend other things. Of course, there’s also a manual curation aspect to that—so we can also promote devotional content, the Mass, in addition to maybe content that aligns with what folks are looking for.

So there’s always that tension between engine recommendation—algorithmic recommendations—and then the human judgment of “I think we should put this up there” or “it’s new” or “it’s exciting.” But we definitely have to have an eye towards privacy. And in my prior work, I’ve—luckily—worked for companies that take that very seriously. And we definitely need to continue to do so at EWTN, because that data can be quite private. And we will do that as we continue to build our platforms going forward.

Msgr. James Shea:

Alexandre I was moved by Michael’s story about um Mother Angelica in prayer…I don’t know how many people said no before you said yes to leaving Goldman Sachs to co-found hallow but tell us about your story as a founder and why did you say yes and what is hallow.

From Intellectual Faith to Practical Detachment

Alessandro DiSanto:

Very yeah very small questions so um yeah I mean that was what you might call a

n unconventional decision—or an ROI-negative decision is how my years might have put it at the time.

Brief context: I come from a big Italian-American family. My mother was born and raised in Italy. My grandparents moved in when I was born—never learned English. My family ran pizza shops, made homemade wine—big G—and so like, Italian, Catholic, sometimes in that order.

So that meant Catholic grade school, high school, and ultimately college at Notre Dame. I always gravitated more towards the intellectual experience of the faith. I took Aquinas as my confirmation saint—I think Father Aquinas is here—so carrying on the legacy. No pressure.

But I didn’t allow that—you know, I could go 10 rounds on the Summa or the Catechism or whatever. I knew all the rules. I was really good at the theology class part of life. But I didn’t allow that to grow into a personal spirituality or life of discernment.

So, you know, I was going to Mass, doing what I was supposed to, volunteering, Eucharistic minister—but career and everything else was like, for me to figure out and do whatever I wanted. Which resulted in working really hard to make a bunch of money and being successful in the eyes of the world and my peers.

The Idea of Hallow

Hallow does not exist because we sat down and tried to come up with a really good idea or business plan or something like that. It was a very unexpected series of experiences in our own spiritual journeys.

I’m one of three co-founders and a broader founding team of six. We were a group of friends that went to Notre Dame together, went into different career paths, and were catching up on the weekends as friends. And we realized there were two really big sets of issues that we were going through.

My version was: I was working seven days a week, 90-hour workweeks—legitimately, like, all the time. Thank God my now-wife stuck through that part of the journey, because that was pretty hard. I liked the work, but it was super stressful.

And I was just trying to find a little bit of peace in everyday life. I did not at all identify that as a spiritual need, which looking back was a big miss. For me it was physiological. I was focused on heart rate, blood pressure, anxiety stuff—which is so part of our modern culture.

My then-best friend, now co-founder Alex Jones—no relation to InfoWars, so we get a lot of crazy tweets every once in a while—he had fallen away from his Catholic upbringing and had gotten really into mindfulness meditation using an app called Headspace. He’d been using it every day for almost four years.

He looked at me, his stressed-out friend, and said, “Hey, you should try meditation.” I said, “Look, if I can fix my life in 10 minutes a day, that’s an ROI-positive decision.” So, sure.

A Personal Conversation with God and Conversion

I started doing it almost every day for four weeks. And the way I describe the experience: that was helpful from a physiological perspective, but as soon as I created 10 minutes of silence, all these—what I would now call—small-v vocational questions popped up in that space.

Like: What are you doing with your life? Would you ever stop to think—not what you want, but what God might be calling you to do?

And that was a big, scary set of questions. I did the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. I said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” swept the questions under the rug, and went back to working all the time.

Meanwhile, thank God, Alex met his now-wife, fell in love—Megan—and was going through Pre-Cana while being a McKinsey consultant. So we had the consulting-versus-finance thing going on.

And he was thinking: “If I’m gonna jump through all these hoops to get married in the Church, I might as well figure out if I actually believe in God or not,” which is good logic.

So he said, “Okay, where do I get started?” Being a millennial man with a big question, he went to the only place that can answer it—which is YouTube. “Does God exist? Proofs of the existence of God.” He found people like Fr. Mike Schmitz, Bishop Barron, and others, and became energized about his faith again.

But then he’d watch things like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, New Atheism—“you don’t need God” type stuff—and be confused again. So he’s bouncing back and forth.

But he kept coming back to this idea: Growing up, he was always told you could talk to this guy—meaning God. And if you could have a personal relationship with Him, then why not just do that?

So he said, “Alright God, I’m going to try and talk to you every day for two years. If you want me to know you’re there, this is your window.”

We are not supposed to put God on terms. There’s a lot of pride and hubris in that demand. But it wasn’t two weeks or two months—it was two years.

Discovering Prayer

But he didn’t know how to have the conversation. So he called the former director of ours, Fr. Pete from Notre Dame, who now runs campus ministry—certainly Our Lady’s favorite football team. Okay, we can agree to disagree on the rest.

(Side note: Alabama had a Catholic coach, so I feel like I have to weigh in there. You just crossed the line. With this liquored-up crowd, we’re gonna get a fistfight going.)

Anyway, he calls Fr. Pete and says, “Yo FP, quick question—does the Church have any meditation stuff? ‘Cause I like meditation, but I’m looking for something Catholic to see if God’s real.”

Fr. Pete just laughed out loud and said, “Alex, I don’t know how many classes you slept through while you were here, but we’ve been doing this for over 2,000 years. It’s called prayer. And you should really know how to do that.”

So he said, “Great, where do I get started?” And Fr. Pete told him: “Go to Lectio Divina. Google it. Get a Bible. Meditate. Spend time with God’s Word.”

So he did that. Takes his now-wife’s Bible off the shelf, opens to a random page, grabs a paragraph—and it happened to be Matthew chapter 6, Sermon on the Mount, where the disciples ask, “Lord, how should we pray?” The answer, of course, is the Lord’s Prayer.

And the word that jumped out to him to meditate on was hallow—from “Hallowed be thy name.” He had this deeply transcendent, contemplative experience. Felt God’s overwhelming presence in that moment. Broke down into tears. Had this deep desire to try to love Him back.

Building a Catholic Prayer App

So, being the McKinsey consultant, he goes on Amazon, buys 16 books. He’s gonna break down this market, map the whole spirituality stack—St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, Ignatian spirituality, the whole thing.

And the next Sunday, I—the Italian of the group—was hosting Sunday dinner. And he was like, “Hey, you’re Catholic. You ever heard of Lectio Divina?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “You ever heard of the Examen?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “Have you even heard of the Rosary?”
I said, “I know what the Rosary is, alright? I am Italian.”

He’s like, “You gotta check this stuff out.”

So I started doing Lectio in the morning, spending time with the Word, and then the Examen in the evening—reflecting on my day, looking for what the Jesuits would call consolation and desolation. And they immediately clicked as the tools I was missing to answer those big, scary questions I’d been running away from:

“Lord, what do you want from my life?” Not in some big scary academic way, but like—in the here and now. On Thursday evening. In this room.

From Prayer to Purpose

We’re talking more and more about this as friends. “Hey, did you try this? I found this blog. Try this prayer.” We’re getting pretty energized.

And we’re like, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if, instead of stacking all these books in the corner of our apartments, we could be guided in the same audio-guided way that the secular meditation apps were doing—but for authentic prayer?”

There’s a bunch of stuff on YouTube, and that’s great—but the ads were pretty disruptive. And we thought, “Can’t be that hard to code a simple play/pause button.” We’d record some friends reading scripts, doing this stuff.

We did that. The more time we spent on it, our friends and family wanted to check it out. And it was really seeing the graces that started to come into their life—just committing to 10 minutes a day in daily prayer—that hit us in the head. Like: “Hey guys, instead of thinking about discernment, why don’t you do something? Why don’t you think about this?”

So we took it to prayer on a Saturday morning in October 2018. Discerning a pretty clear call to go help the world pray.

Two Mondays later, I walked into my partner’s office to quit—to go build a prayer app.

That was five and a half years ago. I apologize for going a little long there—but that’s why we exist: to help people pray and learn the things we missed in our lives that have now given us purpose and meaning.

Msgr. Shea:
Yeah, I’m super interested, Alexandro. At the beginning, you were talking about how you could go ten rounds with Aquinas, and how you had really gravitated toward the intellectual part of the faith. And you kept your faith all through those struggles. But the intellectual tradition of the Church has lots of resources for coping with daily life — but it wasn’t until you started praying that things came alive.

Can you help us discern the difference? What happened? Did it not seep in deeply enough, or what?

Alessandro DiSanto:

Yeah, I mean, I would—uh, I wouldn’t say I was doing well in living out my Catholic faith at that time. And certainly, I know the Angelic Doctor would have looked at me and said, “You missed the whole point.”

At a conversation at dinner last night, we talked about how after all he wrote, in the mere experience of the beatific vision, he said, “All that I’ve written is like straw.” Right? So I clearly missed a lot.

I think—and this is, you know, I’m a very proud product of Catholic education. My wife and I are very involved in Catholic Ed, local level and at higher ed. I think I allowed myself to settle in pride, which you talked about and warned us about earlier today in your keynote. That, like, if I could pass the test and know the rules, I did what I was supposed to.

And I didn’t create the space to listen to God. I think it was the listening, as opposed to me telling and regurgitating all the things I had learned, that I was missing.

There was so much noise and so much of myself—and I’ll only speak for me, not the rest of the team here. My journey was: I was so full of me and what I wanted in the world that I didn’t have any space or silence to hear what God wanted for me.

I think that was the problem. I crowded out what should have been the natural extension of learning about Him—which was to actually know Him.
Our “why” as a faith is primarily a who, not a what. And I got that backwards.

Reaching the World through Hallow and the Super Bowl

Msgr. Shea:
Michael spoke very movingly about the growth of EWTN worldwide. How many people are you reaching with Hallow? And tell us about the Super Bowl.

Alessandro DiSanto:
It was anticlimactic for me, because I was there in Vegas, so I didn’t get to see the ad, which was interesting. But I got 57 text messages all at once from people I hadn’t talked to in 10 years.

We ran a Super Bowl ad this year, and it was pretty amazing. We just hit 20 million downloads. We’re available in eight languages, in every country—except as of last week, China, where we were kicked out for “illegal content,” which was fun.

Illegal meaning… Jesus.

So yeah, the Super Bowl ad—there’s a long version of that story. The short version is: in our discernment of it, we had the opportunity—which is rare. It’s obviously expensive, and so we had to discern quite a bit about whether it was a prudent use of resources.

What it ultimately came down to is two things:

One was that it’s only every 12 or 13 years that the Super Bowl Sunday immediately precedes Ash Wednesday. So the ability to have a really contextual call to action—“Prioritize prayer this Lent,” in the midst and chaos of everything else—was important.

Also, the second reason: we had tested TV as a channel, and we love TV. So, you know, we’re certainly not anti-TV. We ran an ad during the last Republican primary debate with Jonathan Roumie, who popped up in literally the middle of the debate and said:

“Hey, I know there’s a lot to get angry about in the world right now. There’s a lot going on. Will you just take a couple seconds to pray with me, and pray for peace for our country?”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

He did a short prayer, and that worked really well in terms of driving downloads and people using the app. So those two things—the timing, which felt important, and the fact that we had seen some ROI on TV—we ended up pulling the trigger.

We ended up having over 2 million downloads in February, which is when Lent was this year. Shortly after Ash Wednesday, we were the first religious or wellness app ever to reach number one in the app store—across all apps. Above TikTok, Netflix, Google. It was incredibly, incredibly humbling.

And yeah, I think it’s a testament to the power of media—obviously done well and oriented toward the right thing. In a world that’s so full of noise and distraction and division, a message of peace and personal relationship with Christ can actually cut through that. And I think we’ve benefited immensely from that dynamic.

Msgr. Shea:
Thank you very much. So, a question for all of you: we’re living in one of these times in history when there are some seismic shifts happening, and people are disengaging from faith in a pretty rapid way.

How, in this environment, can Catholic media of all kinds engage those who are disengaging?

How—of course there’s grace—but how, using our meager human resources, are we able to quicken the activity of God in the heart of those who stumble across or come into contact with our content?

Meeting People Where They Are

Sean Graber:
Well, I was going to jump in to say that, you know, we have to reach people where they are. There are so many amazing stories. As I’ve met people at EWTN, quite literally, people have said, “Hey, I was flipping through the channels one night, came across Mother [Angelica], and the next weekend I was driving down to Birmingham to meet her.” That was a way that we could reach people earlier on—when there were a few channels, and you could have that experience.

Today, we need to find people where they are. So we do have television channels and radio stations. We have our own apps, which we’re in the process of rebuilding—we’re very excited about that. But the folks who are losing their faith, the reality is, they’re not going to come to any of those places. So we need to go out where they are and reach them.

Whether that’s on TikTok with content repurposed from Mother Angelica’s past, or whether that’s partnering with—there’s probably people in this room, you know—Exorcist Files, and these kinds of stories that are cyclical and Catholic in their essence, but also have, I would say, an entertainment value as well.

You can go and capture—have you watched The Exorcist Files? It’s very scary. I had to sort of abandon it at one point because it was really freaking me out. But you can’t actually be scared by that unless you believe that it could be true.

And so I think we need to embrace these new forms of media, and then also tell stories that captivate people. And the great thing is, well, we all know that we have the truth, and the fullness of that truth, but we also have amazing stories to tell.

If we can combine those stories, put them in the right place at the right time, grace is going to have to work for us, without a doubt. But we’re putting ourselves in contention, right? And I think that’s what we have to do. Then maybe the rest is up to the Holy Spirit. But there’s a lot that we can do ourselves to put the right conditions in place for the Spirit to work.

Catholic Media as an Early Adopter of Technology

Michael Warsaw:
So first of all, I think our job as Catholic media—and it’d be interesting to hear whether you define yourself as Catholic media specifically or not, but that’s an aside, I’m doing your job, sorry—our job as Catholic media is to do what the Church has always done.

You know, 1530s, 1538, Vatican press began. 1931, Vatican Radio. You know, Marconi developed radio, and it began at the Vatican. So if you have radio today, it’s because of Marconi—your Italian countryman, there you go. Mother Angelica once said I was an honorary Italian, so I’m good.

Marconi used radio and developed that technology. The Church has always been an early adopter of technologies in the service of the Gospel.

If you think also—I’ll put on my Vatican consulting hat here for a minute—you think of the great document Inter Mirifica, 1963, came out of the Second Vatican Council, which really was an instruction on the means and use of social communication and how the Church should be using the technologies that were known then in the service of the Gospel.

There’s an admonition in there that we should be using the means of social communications for the service of mankind and the building up of humanity. There’s also an admonition about using these means contrary to that goal—and how the Church grieves with a maternal grief. I may not have that exactly right, but it’s this maternal sense.

We always have to stay rooted in what the Church says the purposes of media are. So for those of us in Catholic media who have media platforms, I think our obligation is to serve mankind, as the Church calls us to—to preach the Gospel and preach the truth, and to put the truth out there.

The Mission of Truth in a Post-Truth World

I think one of the biggest problems we have today—whether it’s in secular society or in the Church itself—is a lack of willingness to stand up for and speak the truth.

Our mission statement at EWTN, from 43, 44 years ago, is “the advancement of truth as defined by the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.” Everything we do is judged in that way. Whether it’s EWTN News—and looking at Montse over there, who knows that the day she walked in, one of the first things we talked about was that—that is the standard by which everything we put out must be judged: the advancement of truth.

We live in a post-truth world. I’ve written a lot about this, I’ve talked a lot about this. We’re in a very, very odd time. You’ve written a lot, you’ve done a lot on this topic as well. We’re in a post-truth world where people just simply disregard objective facts as if they’re disposable.

So I think what we have to do in Catholic media is to go out there in the marketplace, on every single platform, in every single medium, every way we can, and say: no, there is objective truth. Hello, people—yes, there are facts. There is natural law. There are objective truths. And if you get on board with that, you’re going to find the answers you’re looking for.

That’s our obligation as Catholic media platforms and outlets. We’re a little different, obviously, than you, in many respects—in news and some of the other things that are not really part of your approach, but which have an important role to play in the advancement of truth.

Different Roles in the Catholic Media Ecosystem

Alessandro DiSanto:
Yeah, I would echo—maybe piggyback on—the last point. I think it’s key to know that, in the same way that when fighting a war you have different branches of military service—the Air Force is different than the Navy, which is different than the Army—for important reasons, people play different roles.

I think of Catholic media as an ecosystem. Very symbiotic, but different and intentionally different, playing different roles. So anything that is a one-size-fits-all solution is not a solution—and likely going to hurt more than it helps.

Two things. One: as a former Wall Street guy, I tend to look at all the numbers for everything.

To your point on engaging with the disaffiliated or operating in that type of world—if you look at any metric of institutional Church participation, starting in the postwar era versus now (so the 60s or 70s versus now), the metrics are down somewhere between 30 and 50%, depending on the metric: annual priestly ordinations, marriages happening in churches, infant baptisms—whatever the case is.

If you look at the behaviors of faith, they are way less affected. So if you look at CARA—the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate out of Georgetown—they track things like frequency of prayer. The number is within one percentage point of what it was in the 1970s. It’s like 79–80% of Catholics pray at least once a week.

So you’re like, okay, what’s going on?

The Spiritual But Not Religious and Reaching the “Nones”

If you look at the trends in disaffiliation, there’s an interesting dynamic happening. It is true that, in some ways, the fastest-growing religion in the United States is former Catholics—not great. A somewhat silver lining is that there hasn’t really been a rise in atheism, and there hasn’t been a rise in evangelicals, Protestants, whatever.

So where else can you go? I’m sure people in this room have heard of the rise of the “spiritual but not religious,” the “nones”—N-O-N-E-S. Are you religious? Yes. What religion? None.

I think what that speaks to is: the desire to know God is written on the human heart. Just because you feel like you no longer have a home in the traditional institutions within which to search for that answer doesn’t mean that need goes away.

So I think the way we play our role—which is inherently relational in terms of prayer—is speaking at the level of need, of human desire, of human nature first, before getting into the very important catechetical topics. That’s our approach.

Hallow’s Strategy: Relationship First, Doctrine Follows

We see that bear fruit in a lot of different ways. When you create an account on Hallow—which you should all do—you don’t answer the question of what denomination you are or how you identify religiously. But we do occasional anonymous surveys to see where people are at.

Something like 35–40% of the users coming in the door are not primarily Catholic. And for anyone who’s been in the app, there’s not any question that it is a pretty Catholic thing. We’re talking about John Paul the Great, the Rosary, Mary, all these—the saints.

But if you lead in a way that speaks the language of peace, of relationship, of discernment, of virtue, of purpose—you get to start the conversation. And it’s once you start the conversation that then you can—I always use the Road to Emmaus here…right—you’ve got to walk, you’ve got to ask questions first. After you break bread together, then you turn around and go back to Jerusalem, right? And so that’s our approach in a disaffiliated world: start the conversation in a way that it can actually start and lead to other things.”

Msgr. Shea:

“Yeah, I love, love, love that. I think that when it’s dark all around us, the light shines all the more brightly. And it is the case that people are hungry and they need the Lord—it’s written onto the human heart, as you were saying. And so the chance that EWTN and Hallow and other Catholic media outlets have to throw a wide net and to bring all kinds of souls in is just wonderful.”