Stop investing (only) in Catholic content

Catholic content creators are doing good work.

Bishop Barron, Matt Fradd, and Katie McGrady. Independent creators on Substack, YouTube, etc. They’re reaching people and spreading the gospel.

But I think we’ve gotten the ratio wrong.

It seems like 80% of Catholic media investment (time and money) flows into digital content. YouTube channels, podcasts, social media campaigns. At the same time, the remaining 20% goes to physical, local art—hymns, murals, sculptures.

We need to flip that ratio. Although it has a smaller reach, real-world creativity offers a more lasting benefit.

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Catholic donors and investors love metrics.

They love seeing view counts, subscriber numbers, and engagement rates. And digital platforms are brilliant at marketing themselves, displaying metrics in an attractive design so you feel like you’re making real progress. This gives us an inflated idea of how important social media is in the future of evangelization.

So dollars flow to the digital creators, especially those with the biggest numbers.

But a little-known principle of internet marketing shatters this illusion: Not all views are created equal.

An email subscriber is worth more than a YouTube subscriber. A YouTube view is more valuable than a TikTok view. A follower on Substack is worth more than a follower on X. That is because the former in all of these examples is more engaged than the latter examples. So your content has more of an impact on that person. It has more influence.

Apply that principle to digital vs physical media more broadly.

A “view” on a real-world piece of Catholic art is worth way more than a view on a piece of social media content. By real-world, I mean anything visual like a sculpture, mosaic, painting, mural; auditory like a hymn; or written like a novel or poetry.

A million views on a YouTube video means a million people watched and immediately scrolled to the next thing. But think about a piece of art in a parish. Thousands of parishioners will see the sacred art in their parish every week for decades. The mosaic in the narthex shapes how a young girl understands the gospel for the first several years of their life. At her wedding, she looks at it before she enters the Church for her wedding, and years later when she baptizes her son. It becomes the backdrop for every moment of communion she has with God.

The mosaic may only be seen by 1/100 of the people who see the YouTube video. But the quality of those views matters so much more. The YouTube video will be forgotten.

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To put this principle into practice, I wrote a hymn for Epiphany a couple of years ago.

I know classical four-part harmony, so I set it to a tune, wrote out the chord arrangement, and handed it to our organist. “Is this good enough for Mass?” He said it was beautiful. We used it twice last year.

People were struck by it. They came up afterward: “Patrick, you wrote that?” The words landed differently than anything I’ve posted online. If that hymn keeps getting sung at my parish, those words will impact those people more than my average Substack article ever could.

That’s the power of local art.

The major pieces of art we all recognize began as local art. For example, the legend around Silent Night is that the song was written on guitar for a small midnight Mass when the organ broke. Just a local piece of art shaped Christmas for the entire world ever since.

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The same Catholic investors who fund digital content often complain about how the secular world captured Hollywood, the music industry, art, etc.

But we used to have devout Catholics making great movies. Where did those filmmakers come from? Local art scenes. Local communities that valued and invested in beauty.

If you want Catholic culture to keep declining, stop investing in local artists. Because that’s where national artists come from.

So, if you’re a Catholic digital content creator: create something local. If you’re a poet posting on Substack, write a hymn and hand it to your organist. See if they can set it to a tune. If you’re a painter making digital art for Instagram, paint something for your parish instead. I promise it’ll do more.

If you’re a wealthy Catholic investor, find local artists and pay them to create beautiful things for parishes. Don’t chase metrics. Spend the time researching instead of just supporting the guy with the biggest number.

We need Catholic content creators, but we need Catholic hymnists more. We need Catholic muralists, Catholic sculptors, and Catholic composers so we can leave something to the next generation of Catholics.

Our children deserve something more beautiful than YouTube videos.

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