The CatholiCity Message
Volume II, Number 12 – March 27, 1998
Dear CatholiCity Citizen,
This week we're doing something different. No items, just a story.
HOW CATHOLICITY WAS BORN
On August 21st of 1995, Bud, the director of the Mary Foundation, got a phone call from Scott, the director of Mother Angelica's WEWN in Birmingham. He had just read Bud's novel, Pierced by a Sword, and was all excited. Bud jumped on a plane and went to visit him that night. The next day, after giving him a tour of Mother's awesome short wave facility, Scott also introduced Bud to a few Catholic sites on the Internet. It was the first time Bud had ever been online. The guys in the office back home had been telling Bud that the Mary Foundation should get involved with the Internet for several months.
They been reading about the Net in business magazines for a long time, but we all stepped up our research. Our marketing director got an account with AOL and started surfing around. Our "sound man," who was then designing a recording studio for the Mary Foundation, had already started to do research and buy equipment through the Internet. Then, an amazing thing happened.
The very next day after Bud got back from visiting Scott, he had to take a trip with a coworker to Indianapolis. We were early for our appointment, so they stopped by a Mary Foundation benefactor's place along the way, almost on a lark, to say hello. We can't tell you his name to protect his privacy, but over burgers and beer, unsolicited, this gentlemen gave us a check for $100,000. It was by far the largest gift the Mary Foundation had ever received.
By 1996, we still weren't sure what to do with the gift. Buy a building? Record radio programs for WEWN? What?
On February 16th, we were sitting around the office, discussing the Internet, when somebody came up with the idea of "putting a city" for Catholics online. The Internet was a confusing place in 1996. Most people were not online, and were disoriented by such concepts as homepages, servers, URLs, links–the whole thing. But everybody understands what a city is, don't they? For several days, we struggled to think of a name for this "Catholic city," as we had taken to calling it.
What would we name this Catholic city on the Internet? We rejected the following names:
- Catholic Town
- Catholic Village
- Catholic World
After a couple weeks, we decided on the name we had been using all along: CatholiCity (pronounced "Catholic City" or "catholicity"--we like both). We called the benefactor who had given us the big gift, and he gave his blessing to use it for our new project. We recorded an audio tape describing this cybercity and sent it to 3000 Mary Foundation benefactors asking for their reaction and for their prayers, including our first ever 54 Day Rosary Novena. We told them about a place on the Internet, a beautiful Catholic city, where millions of people from all over the world would meet, teach, evangelize, and yes, love each other. Positive responses poured in! "If anybody can do it, the Mary Foundation can," they said. We had apparently established a reputation for doing impossible projects.
We pulled the trigger. We hired a webmaster and a director. By April, we were online. Our graphic interface "cityscape" immediately caused a stir. (You can still view it by clicking on the "Cityscape" link on our Grab Bag page.) One major Catholic Internet guru said of us in a review: "If awards were given for the most fun site on the Net, CatholiCity would win hands down." Less than 10,000 people visited CatholiCity in 1996, a handful of folks compared to nowadays, but we were off and running.
In many ways, things have changed dramatically since our birth. Very few people use 14.4 modems now. Some big Catholic sites have fallen on hard times, and some have even gone off the Net. Most television commercials didn't feature corporate URLs. It was unusual to meet a businessman who had an email address.
It's been a struggle. We almost shut down last year–not because souls weren't being helped by the City–for financial reasons. We ran out of our seed money a long time ago, and we lose several thousand dollars every month, and like most Catholic sites on the Internet, our future is uncertain. Just today, our webmaster informed told us that we're maxing out our bandwidth, and we're going to have to buy more to keep up with you guys. We're more overworked than ever. We don't know what to do. We've told you that we don't know if we'll last beyond summer of 1998.
But a few things haven't changed:
- Souls are being touched in CatholiCity.
- You, the CatholiCity Citizens, hold the key.
- We still believe that if we survive, tens of millions of souls will be touched by this "Catholic City" over the coming years.
Maybe it's not such an amazing story. This medium has been a huge challenge from the start. It's technically buggy, expensive, and contains all the glory and tragedy that is inevitable when thousands of people who believe deeply in something come together. It's messy. It's fun. It's full of surprises.
And we need your help, as always. Thanks for being a part of it all.
And thanks for listening. See you next week. You'll never know what we're going to write about.
Yours in Christ,
The Friends at CatholiCity
