Its Time to Get Back to Basics

Feb 17

Sometimes in life we lose our way, and it’s a gift to come to a realization of it. But we have to do something with that realization. This is my story, and my plan for a new direction.

You may have noticed I’ve been changing things up at my little apostolate. It’s more than just a refresh, it’s a renewal. Because my apostolate, ultimately is about sharing my experience with you, with the hope that it helps you in your own Catholic adventure, I want to share with you what this renewal is about, and why I’m doing it. To put it succinctly , sometimes we lose our way, and we have to get back to basics.

For Love of the Work

I started this apostolate in 2017 as a blogging “mission” to share my experiences and wisdom I’ve acquired over my years as a man on a Catholic adventure. It was a way of serving and honoring the Blessed Mother after I completed the consecration to Jesus through Mary. I wanted to share my knowledge, experience, and ideas with others with the hope of helping them in their Catholic adventure.

But something changed.

Around 2022 or 2023 I started to sense that I would likely be losing my job inside of that year. So I started an LLC (Fiat Media) and converted my writing apostolate to a professional podcasting apostolate, which produced “The Catholic Experience” podcast. I wanted to build some momentum for the new company so that when/if I lost my job, I’d at least have a small but already-growing company to generate at least a little bit of income while I looked for another job. Plus I needed a way to pay for all the Rolaids I needed to deal with the heartburn this new trial was giving me.

[There was more to Fiat Media than the production of my own podcast, and there was a lot of prayer, consideration, and brainstorming with others before I went forward with it. But those details are not important to this little story so I’m skipping them]

Full-On Assault Against the Odds

I went Full-Marine. I hit the ground running, and I hit it hard with feverish aggression. I was podcasting as frequently as I could, trying to produce interesting episodes that were entirely unlike other Catholic podcasts and based on intriguing topics no one else was covering, and that no one else could cover the way I did . I spent a little bit of money—nothing irresponsible—on targeted advertising, launched full-on assaults on social media, posting episodes, blogs, short but substantial posts, beautiful graphics with inspiring messages. I was working hard, and a lot, on top of also looking for a new job, and tending to my family. It was the shock-and-awe approach I learned as a Marine, but the only one shocked was me.

After two years of all of this product, all of this output and all of this effort I had to admit that my efforts went nowhere; certainly no growth that was congruous or even proportional to my effort. The podcast just never found a regular audience, the social media algorithms were an impossible barrier to my target audience, and the podcasting market in general was just oversaturated, making it near impossible to get noticed. And, who knows, maybe my product just sucks, or I’m bad at executing my ideas. All of this despite working furiously to find success.

Disdain for “The Work”

“What started in 2017 from a position of peace and joy became an apostolate fueled by fear”

I realized something over the past month or so. Something that had completely gone over my head up till now: My manic efforts to build my little company all started from a position of panic when I realized I might be losing my job. What started in 2017 from a position of peace and joy became an apostolate fueled by fear and panic, and then continued by my refusal to accept failure. What started out as a love for the work became a disdain for “the work”; running an apostolate as a business.

The Tresshold of Stupid

When I came to realize all of this, I experienced something of an epiphany and saw that my apostolate had lost its way, and that I had, too. Somewhere in my timeline I took a wrong turn, and just kept going. Refusing to accept ‘defeat’ I continued to try to make this bad choice work, forgetting one of my own personal doctrines: “Once you cross the threshold of stupid, everything that follows will be stupid. The only way to change the outcome is to go back across that threshold and correct where you went wrong”

I’ve been telling that to people for years. There’s a lot of “stupid” out there, and I know I’m not immune to it myself. But I guess in my fast pace I had failed to realize I had crossed my own threshold of stupid. I crossed it when The Catholic Adventurer became a podcaster, and CatholicAdventurer.com became a business rather than a casual little ministry. My mission was always sincere, mind you. But it had lost its way a little bit.

It became clear to me that after crossing that threshold of stupid I coninued my errant path, even after I found a new job. Because while I no longer needed the business to generate an income to help support my family, I didn’t want to admit that the business and apostolate was a failure, so I intended to work like hell (within reason) to make it work, and to make my efforts finally pay off. But ‘once you cross the threshold of stupid, everything that follows will be stupid’ and I had to go BACK to where I went wrong and course correct. So here I am.

Back Across the Threshold

With this new awareness I decided to stop “working” the apostolate as a business. I stopped offering subsciptions, and I’ve been making my premium content available for free on The Saint Foundry (eventually on Substack, too). I’ve also stopped looking at “the numbers” (downloads, visitors, plays) which were always abysmal anyway. And I’m returning to Substack to do what I set out to do in 2017—just create for love of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Just write what I want to write, talk about what I want to talk about, and just put this Catholic adventurer forward—my spirit, my heart, my knowledge, my perspectives, my lived experiences—for others to potentially learn and benefit from. I’m just going to create what I feel, in service to the Gospel and the Holy Virgin, rather than in service to the company. No more audience appeal, or tailoring this-and-that to be more appealing to strangers whose minds I can’t read.

I’m sure what I write/produce going forward will have natural appeal to some people, while others will find it boring, poorly done, or just not interesting. That’s all fine. Part of my personal ‘threshold of stupid” was that I started caring about that sort of thing—partly out of professional necessity, and partly out of pride. I started this apostolate out of love for God and Our Lady, and that’s where I’m bringing it back to.

Mission first, not business-first. Produce something beautiful and edifying and stop playing the game of chasing an audience. Those are the first two pillars of my course correction. The third can be summed up this way: There are three transcendentals: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful. I started my apostolate out of love of all three, but it became about just the one—Truth. I want to do more than that, and I want to offer you more than that. So I’m going back to basics in that regard, too.

Going forward I’ll continue to write and podcast about theology and philosophy but I’m no longer going to limit myself to just the Truth. I have more to share than that, and I’m going to go back to sharing it. That’s why I refer to my Substack as “Catholic Adventurer Plus” It goes beyond the podcast, and beyond what I’ve confined myself to over the past two years.

I’m going to stop pushing the “forming saints” and “on a mission to form saints” tag lines. I’m still technically doing that, that was never just marketing-speak. But I think the tagline became my guiding star once my apostolate became a business, and that’s part of where my apostolate went wrong. So I’ve come up with something I like better, that more authentically represents what’s in my heart, and why I started my apostolate in 2017: