Cathal BarryCathal Barry speaks to iCatholic founder Fr Bill Kemmy and presenter Wendy Grace about the innovating online project
A new online project is helping people to know, live and share their faith.
iCatholic is the brainchild of the former Kildare and Leighlin chancellor Fr Bill Kemmy, whose goal is to “establish a trusted brand where people can go to access high quality content from the Church”.
Fr Kemmy, who is now a curate in Prosperous, said the idea for the project originated during his time as chancellor, when was responsible for the diocesan website kandle.ie.
“In thinking about the possibilities of the online work I began to think about the place that video had,” he told The Irish Catholic.
Unconvinced that YouTube was the most appropriate platform for what he had in mind, Fr Kemmy opted to develop his own delivery system akin to that of the RTÉ Player.
“I felt like that was a good model for the Irish church to follow. That way we would have our own player sand would be able to develop our own delivery system and there would be a lot of advantages that would flow from that,” he said.
iCatholic was in its infancy around the time of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 2012.
“What came from that was that iCatholic became the archive of the recordings that were done of the talks at the congress,” Fr Kemmy said.
Netflix
The advent of websites such as Netflix prompted the innovating priest to push iCatholic more in direction of becoming an “online library of on demand content”.
“The idea is that the Church should have its own version of that,” he said.
Noting that “in former times you would need a big TV station and aerial to place content on television”, Fr Kemmy said he “began to see that there was a way to bring content to people at the level that they are used to on television without actually having a TV station”.
“We have gone through an era of going from ordinary phones to smart phones and now we are moving from ordinary TV to smart TV. That opens up huge possibilities.
“It was easy to see that there was an opportunity there. The challenge was to gather both the delivery system and the content that would make use of that system,” he said.
That has come to fruition now with iCatholic’s weekly programme ‘A Question of Faith’ being aired on CatholicTV in the United States and online.
“It proves that we can produce high quality content that can work on both traditional television and on the internet,” Fr Kemmy said.
Presenter Wendy Grace explained that ‘A Question of Faith’ developed from an inconsistent feature on the website to a now established weekly half hour programme after iCatholic was approach by US based CatholicTV.
Since then, it has even had requests from further Catholic networks in Pittsburgh and New York.
Wendy, who presents the Morning Show on Spirit Radio, said she has been “enriched” by her experience working with iCatholic.
“I got involved because I think it’s very important to have some sort of digital medium to communicate stories that reflect our faith. I have to say I have been enriched by the people that I meet through working with iCatholic.
Hunger
“I think there is a real hunger out there from people to hear other people’s stories. There are very few places out there for people to get news and information connected to faith and value based issues that they can rely on,” she said, adding that she “would love to see the site used as a resource for solid digital faith based content but also for the catechetical side of things”.
The presenter also said she wanted to get “as many young people as possible” involved in projects like iCatholic.
On the subject of youth, Fr Kemmy admits there is “perhaps a generational challenge” when working with new forms of media, “but like everything that’s new you have to invest time in sitting down and explaining it to people”.
Fr Kemmy said he was “very happy” that half the dioceses in Ireland have now have an iCatholic feed embedded on their websites.
“We’re beginning to develop the idea of network that iCatholic is helping to move content easily around at national level,” he said.
The project itself covers “very wide range” of issues, Fr Kemmy explained.
“We do lot on education and schools, on liturgy, on mission, on justice and on evangelisation.
“We don’t want to be pigeonholed as offering just one vision of the Church or just one type of spirituality. We are hoping that we are offering a fair representation of the Catholic Church which is very broad. We would see ourselves as very mainstream,” he said.
Partnership is one of the fundamental pillars of the project, Fr Kemmy insisted.
“We are trying to do this together. Something very good is possible if we work together,” he said, noting that an example of that is the growing partnership iCatholic enjoy with have with Kairos Communications in Maynooth.
“They have been very generous and have welcomed us and given us use of their studio at least one day a week which has really allowed us to develop. It has been a great help to us,” he said.
Partnerships
Fr Kemmy said he would like to develop further partnerships with dioceses, religious orders and Church agencies.
“We want to develop a common network. There is an open invitation for Church partners to come on board and to utilise the platform we are offering,” he said.
The iCatholic project is run on a shoe string.
Fr Kemmy said people “would be amazed to know the very modest budget that we have to create all we do and to reach a point that we have a weekly half hour programme on television in America. It’s remarkable,” he said, explaining that the project’s slim budget comes from “a small number of very generous donors who have helped us along with donations we get when we do work for our partners”.
On a budget of just €50,000 over the past year, iCatholic has created over 900 videos across 60 different channels and has reached over 360,000 people through their website, apps and social media platforms.
Ultimately, Fr Kemmy said, iCatholic is about “serving local needs”.
“You have to look after local needs in order to build a national network. The iCatholic player isn’t a closed system. It has been deliberately designed so that it can work on the platforms of our partners. You can decide what you want from iCatholic on your website. We are always trying to think of how we can serve the local need,” he said.
Fr Kemmy said the iCatholic team is now “actively working” on how best to get on peoples TV’s in Ireland.
“The goal for us is to establish a trusted brand where people can go to access high quality content from the Church.”
www.icatholic.ie