Our last call for support—the Catholic Exchange fundraiser ends tonight!
Becoming the editor of Catholic Exchange was a moment of clarity in my life. It was unplanned, unanticipated, and serendipitous. I’ve been smiling ever since being offered the position by publisher Charlie McKinney.
Why? Well, I grew up around this apostolate. I was in the background, playing with toys, during its development under my father, founding editor Tom Allen.
My Mom likes to point out that I was in the room where it happened when co-founders Matthew Pinto, founder of Ascension Press, Anthony DeBellis, CFO of Catholic Action for Faith and Family, longtime news director Tom Kyd, and my Dad gave it its name.
On the wall at my parents’ house is a framed front-page article from the National Catholic Register, announcing the launch of Catholic Exchange with a photo of me in my father’s arms—it’s as if I was walking towards this door (or hanging around it) all along!
Sharing Christ with the world through various forms of media is in my blood. While running Catholic Exchange for its first ten years, my Dad produced and directed the Champions of Faith baseball documentary and co-wrote the million-selling A Guide to the Passion: 100 Questions about The Passion of the Christ with my Mom at our dinner table. They set an example for me of Catholic evangelization being a perfectly normal part of everyday life.
I certainly noticed the struggles that came along with communicating the Gospel message in secular Hollywood, where my Dad worked for many years. I grew up noticing the anti-Christian narratives sewn into nearly every movie, TV show, advertisement, etc. And that was back when they were subtle!
The current of anti-Christian media is strong, and it takes many people’s faith away with it, but it’s not omnipotent. God has the final say.
But we need those Catholic voices that witness Christ’s love and truth to the multitudes caught in the current!
We live in an online age, which is why, for the last 23 years, Catholic Exchange has stood out within the online community as a witness of truth and a haven of spiritual sustenance. We provide a high-visibility platform to great Catholic authors so that our evangelizing message can reverberate throughout the English-speaking world.
Our focus remains on sustaining the faithful, but we also want to be a lifeline to those stuck in the voracious anti-Christian current. To do so, we need your support.
As we end our fundraising campaign today at midnight, I ask you once more to help us extend our fruitful, counter-cultural mission. We have very exciting plans for 2025 that I’ll be telling you about in future letters, but we need your help to get there.
Our nonprofit Catholic apostolate has persevered and grown because of God’s protection; otherwise, the world would have swept it away. However, it’s also endured and borne rich fruit because of you!
To thank you for your gifts of $60 or more (or $5 monthly), we would like to send you a free copy of Dan Burke’s Finding Peace in the Storm. Burke’s book is an indispensable resource for finding peace while learning what it means to unite yourself to the will of God and how to do so more fully.
Please consider becoming a monthly supporter of our mission.
For a commitment of $10 or more per month (or a one-time donation of $120 or more), we will send you a free copy of The World of Marian Apparitions, a coffee table book that you will never tire of reading. It shows how close our Mother in heaven remains to us and gives us hope that God will not abandon us in our hour of need.
Thank you for pushing back against the current with me. Archbishop Fulton Sheen would be proud that we are fighting it, resisting it, and giving God a voice in the hotly contested cultural conversation of our day. And like my father before me, I thank you, dear readers, for your support of Catholic Exchange and your witness of truth and love to the world!
Here’s a further description of Dan Burke’s Finding Peace in the Storm:
Following the death of his spiritual director, St. Alphonsus Liguori penned timeless advice in a letter to one of his spiritual daughters, and it became the famous work titled Uniformity with God’s Will. Now Avila Institute president and renowned author and show host Dan Burke breaks open St. Alphonsus’s eighteenth-century classic for you.
Liguori intersperses fascinating real-life examples from the saints to assist you in remaining steadfast amid afflictions. He explains three temptations that confront us and how to resist them, along with four practices of uniformity to God’s will and a surefire way to unite your sufferings to Christ’s sufferings.
Burke makes it all accessible with profound insights, explanations and reflection questions. You will acquire tips on what to do during periods of aridity or desolation. Above all, you will discover how to enjoy peace of heart in all circumstances and foster loving conversation with God. By learning how to entrust yourself fully to God’s holy will, you will experience His divine embrace and the fulfillment of your deepest desires.
And here’s more information on Wincenty Laszewski’s The World of Marian Apparitions, a true modern-day classic:
The world-changing appearance of Our Lady at Fatima, Portugal, ushered in a continuing series of remarkable apparitions worldwide that the Church has either officially approved or marked as likely-authentic.
Author and Mariologist Wincenty Laszewski summarizes the powerful and urgent messages of these apparitions in this unparalleled, encyclopedic work, which at its publication instantly became the new standard on the subject. Most chapters include portentous warnings—some are ominous, others more hopeful.
This stunning book serves as a wake-up call to the faithful and is a worldwide clarion call to deeper prayer and conversion. It includes:
Over 400 pages describing the fully documented miracles and visionsFascinating accounts by eyewitnesses, including non-believers50+ maps of locations and pilgrimage sitesPhotos and illustrations: documents, events, and faces of the visionariesThe finest works of art and reproductions of Our Lady
Each message and appearance is analyzed and quoted precisely. Their sheer abundance is enough to absorb believing Catholics—and many a skeptic—from all walks of life and reading habits.
Taken together, they will give you hope, confidence even, that the seemingly intractable and sometimes frightening problems of our day will be solved by our loving God in response to our determined prayers, just as Our Lady assures us.
You can donate online
HERE
You can send a check to:
Catholic Exchange
PO Box 5284
Manchester, NH 03108
You can donate by phone at:
800-888-9344
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
