Ep 111 - Hallowed Be Thy Name: Discovering the Roots Behind the #1 Catholic App in the World

The Manly Catholic (02:45.838)
Hello all, welcome to another episode of The Manly Catholic. This is James, your host, and with me tonight we have Alessandro De Santo from Halo. Alessandro, welcome so much to The Manly Catholic.

Alessandro (Hallow) (03:12.217)
Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

The Manly Catholic (03:15.054)
Yes. And, you know, Alessandro is one of the co -founders of Hallow. And I know you guys have heard me and Father Dom talk so many times about the importance that Hallow has had not only on our lives personally, but I know thousands and millions of Catholics around the world, which I'm really excited to kind of dive into the history of that and kind of the goals of Hallow and where it's going from here. Cause I mean, geez, Louise, Alessandro, you guys are taking off like, like Spitfire here. It's pretty exciting to see. So I can't wait to dive into that story a little bit more.

But before we get going, Alessandro, I do want to start with the St. Michael prayer. So we'll start in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou a prince of the heavenly host by the power of God, cast in hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen. Amen. Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.

Now Alessandro, one of the opening questions I always ask my guests is if you could be the patron saint of anything, what would it be and why?

Alessandro (Hallow) (04:22.713)
I'm gonna go with leg day. I'm gonna go with a less than spiritual. I went with it. You gave me a little heads up on that question and I'm gonna stick with my gut instinct. I don't have many physical advantages in life. I've never been super strong or done anything, but leg day has been the one area where I can shine physically. I've always wanted to be better than I am with basketball and ping pong and soccer, but you get me on a leg press or a squat rack and.

The Manly Catholic (04:24.672)
Yes, you went with it. Yes.

Alessandro (Hallow) (04:51.961)
can do some damage. I'm happy to champion that. For many other, potentially many mainly Catholic listeners who maybe skip leg day every once in a while, I want to be some inspiration.

The Manly Catholic (04:54.892)
Yes.

The Manly Catholic (05:02.158)
I love that and you sent that and you're like should I do this like yes, you absolutely should so that is perfect the patron saint of leg day that I don't think has ever been taken so it's all yours Alessandro if you are Working on it. Well, I did what I know this is off topic But I did want to kind of get your opinion as well You know someone who values fitness obviously the patron saint of leg day Why is fitness so important especially for men and Catholic men as well?

Alessandro (Hallow) (05:13.049)
We're working on it. We're working on it.

Alessandro (Hallow) (05:30.297)
Yeah, I think there's a couple, you know, ranging from the very mundane, literal and physical to the metaphysical. I'm certainly not a fitness guru, although I've certainly consumed my fair share of bro science. You know, I think particularly as a father, I've thought a lot about this as a husband and as a father. Like there's just a lot of stuff to do around the house. In our case, you know, with the kids picking them up, like mom's got a lot on her plate.

And particularly, my wife currently is nine months pregnant and we got a little toddler running around. Part of what I think a husband is and what a father is, is someone who can do things for the family. Whether that's constructing the latest convertible toddler bed or carrying a son around when he's just crying and mom can't figure out what's wrong.

to shoveling snow and what. So just being like practical family life dependable, like when something happens, when something goes wrong or just one thing to be done. I think that's really important part of life. I would say also then metaphysically, I have found that in the various seasons of my life, when I've been able to find discipline in my physical fitness, I've been able to find discipline in my prayer life, in my marriage, right? It's like,

Discipline begets discipline. And when we train that part of the soul that is committed to, let's say virtue broadly, right? The habitual orientation to the good. And we don't settle for comfort, right? But we pursue that, which is difficult. I think that permeates in many parts of our life. And think that's just good for us. I also think the more I learn about it, like longevity, like benefits there are pretty real. And like, if I want to be around for my wife and family for a long time, and hopefully got to know my grandkids and things like that, like.

I think I owe it to the family not to leave early.

The Manly Catholic (07:29.806)
Yeah, no, that's that's such a good point to us husbands and fathers out there who maybe they're, you know, obviously your type of stage of life, my stage of life, it's so hard with young kids running around. It's so easy for excuses to and I know I'm sure you've heard of Jocko Willink. Well, he's a, you know, entire US Navy SEAL. I love Jocko's podcast and all that. But I know he talks about to like physical fitness, working out, it needs to be like the number one thing that you do every single day. And I mean, obviously, we talk about the physical and everything like that, the benefits of it.

But he said, if you commit to working out every single day, just naturally every other part of your life, of your day is going to fall into line. So, you know, you have a good workout and then you obviously get the endorphins that go in your brain, the dopamine, so you feel good. And then you, you know, you naturally will want to eat better because people who work out, they tend to eat better and then you want to stay hydrated and then you want to do this and that. So it's everything kind of all the dominoes fall into place. But yeah, so even just, you know, like you said, it doesn't have to be

you know, leg day every day, but you know, just going for a walk, you know, making sure that you're staying fit for your family, hopping on the bike, whatever the case might be every little bit counts. So I know that was off topic, but you said the patrons say leg day. So I had to ask that follow up question, but I

Alessandro (Hallow) (08:41.881)
If anybody is ever having a bad day or needs to pick me up or struggling with something, just Google Jocko Willink good video and it'll be like an hour and a half of like whatever you're struggling with, you will now have the willpower to get through. So that's a great call out and yeah, totally agree.

The Manly Catholic (08:49.87)
Oh.

The Manly Catholic (08:59.598)
And I will put a link in the, I totally forgot about that Alessandro, so thank you. I'm gonna put a link in the show notes for all you guys as well. That is a must see. I've seen that several times and it definitely got me out of, off my butt and into the gym as well. But Alessandro, why don't you give our audience a little bit of background of yourself. I'm sure when you were growing up in high school you did not dream of starting.

an app called Halo. Maybe you did. Maybe this was a lifelong dream of yours. I'm not sure, but just give our audience a little bit of background. You can kind of steer into how that led to this incredible app that you guys created.

Alessandro (Hallow) (09:33.913)
Yeah, absolutely. Short answer is no, I was definitely not planning on that. So I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My mom was born and raised in Italy. My dad's side of the family, also Italian, two generations back. But I grew up on my mom's side, first gen in the US. My grandparents moved in when I was born and never learned English, so I grew up with Italian in the house. My aunts and uncles and mom ran pizza shops.

It's like ultra traditional Italian American story, big garden, homemade wine, still continues today. And so just really had an amazing, amazing childhood filled with a bunch of family love, blessings, really didn't want for anything and just really loved that environment. Grew up Italian Catholic, sometimes in that order and went to Catholic grade school, high school.

I was gravitated towards the intellectual side of life, so did pretty well in school, took Aquinas as my confirmation saint from the first excerpts of the Summa that I read. I was like, this is legit, this is definitely true, and generally oriented pretty well to the question, objection, answer framework of the Summa. I allowed that to go a little bit too far, so if we think about what...

and I know you didn't ask this question, but plays into the story like what sins am I most prone to? Pride and hubris are definitely on that list. So having done well, excuse me, on the intellectual side of life, I kind of allowed particularly faith to be an experience of like, I can memorize all the rules and go 10 rounds with you on the catechism or moral theology or whatever.

And I allowed that to kind of box in faith to theology. And although I was, you know, never stopped going to mass on Sundays and Holy days, and I was always a Eucharistic minister, minister of the extraordinary minister of the Eucharist or lector, wherever I was throughout the country at school. And after, you know, I didn't allow my faith to actually grow into an actual life of discernment or have a personal spirituality or daily prayer life, or even understand what discernment was. And so, you know, I could.

Alessandro (Hallow) (11:49.721)
argue with you and try and convince you on the proofs of the existence of God and tell you a lot about him, but I didn't really know him, at least looking back now. And so where that led me, I went to Notre Dame, studied finance and economics, got caught on the finance bug, went to Wall Street after school, worked at a big investment bank and then subsequently a private equity fund and doing what I thought that, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, work really hard, maybe not.

sleep a ton, maybe drink a little bit too much, but have the esteem of the world and a lot of money in the bank account. And that was really where I was when the, when the Hallow story emerged. And it was not that I was trying to in any way run away from that life, but I was starting to run into the problem of, you I didn't have a ton of peace in everyday life. And I was literally working seven days a week, 90, a hundred hour work weeks, pretty consistently traveling across the country and the world.

And like something was, something was not right. It was like, I needed more peace. Like I was on the verge of, in some cases, literal physical collapse, but also intense psychological stress. And I didn't identify that at all as a spiritual question or a question that had any spiritual, um, you know, consequences or inputs. Um, so the, the Hallow founding story is really one of each of our individual spiritual journeys. So.

The Manly Catholic (13:01.71)
Hmm.

The Manly Catholic (13:18.19)
Hmm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (13:18.233)
I'm one of three co -founders and a broader founding team of six. And what started happening a couple of years out of school is I was living that life and others were living theirs across marketing, consulting, government service, ministry work. We each had our own journeys, but we realized fundamentally there were two sets of issues that we were going through. Mine was the, how do you find peace in a crazy world type of problem? But the other one was the, like, is God even there question? And so Alex.

One of my co -founders and our CEO had a pretty hard falling away experience from his Catholic upbringing to atheism slash agnosticism, depending on the day of the week and his mood. And, um, he would not mind me saying that, but, um, you know, he had gotten really into secular meditation using an app called Headspace. Headspace and Calm are two of the big ones. And so, you know, it's really started with.

The Manly Catholic (14:08.366)
Oh yeah.

Alessandro (Hallow) (14:14.713)
Him using that almost every day for four years. He almost went to India for a retreat after college, but thought the app was cheaper and less logistically complicated. And so settled for the app. And, you know, a couple of years later, as I was living my hectic Wall Street life, he was like, Hey man, you know, you're pretty stressed. You should try meditation. And so for me, that was great. If I can fix my life in 10 minutes a day, great. Sign me up. Happy to pay the whatever was 60 bucks a year.

And so I tried it almost every day for four or five weeks. And the way I described the experience is that, you know, physiologically, it's really good to sit still and take deep breaths. Your heart rate goes down, your blood pressure goes down, both of which I definitely needed. But A, there are some real spiritual dangers of such an inward focused approach, which I then did not know anything about, but now know a lot more about and happy to talk about that.

But more practically, as soon as I created, you know, 10 minutes of silence in my day, basically doing breathing exercises, all of these, what I would now call small V vocational questions started popping up in that space. Like, Hey man, did you ever stop to think now what you want, but what God might be calling you to do? And that was a big, scary set of questions that I did not know at all how to answer despite whatever 16 years of Catholic school education. And so I did what you're not supposed to do. And I just.

Ran away from the problem, stopped meditating, went back to working all the time and like shoved all those big questions into like the closet and locked the door. Alex on the meantime fell in love, was getting married to his now amazing wife and mother of their three children who was a devout Catholic. And he was going through the pre -cana classes, right, to get married and being a mechanical engineer by education and McKinsey consultant by trade.

The Manly Catholic (16:00.462)
Hmm.

The Manly Catholic (16:04.428)
Thank you.

Alessandro (Hallow) (16:10.585)
very analytical guy, he's like, all what's the first part of this? Like, if I'm going to jump through all these hoops to get married in the church, I might as well figure out if I actually believe in God or not, which is like solid, solid question. So being a millennial man, he goes where every millennial man goes for big questions, which is YouTube. And it's, you know, like, does God exist, proof of the existence of God, as if, you know, first person asking these questions in history.

The Manly Catholic (16:30.764)
Thank you.

Alessandro (Hallow) (16:37.337)
And you found Father Mike Schmitz, Bishop Baron, Scott Hahn, and got super energized about his faith again. But then we watch a video from like a Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, kind of new atheism. You don't need God, just be a virtuous person. God is dead kind of stuff. And we'll be confused again. And so he's bouncing back and forth, but in his meditative space, he started having images, religious images, kind of like flashing to his mind, namely the cross.

and say, well, that's weird, but now that you bring it up, you know, growing up, I was always told you could talk to this guy, meaning God, and if you could have a personal relationship with him, then, you know, he must be real. So like, why don't I just do that? So he said, all right, God, I'm gonna try and talk to you every day for two years. If you want me to know you're there, this is your window. You know, let me know. Now, we are obviously not supposed to put God to terms or make deals with God in that way, and there's a lot of pride in that demand.

But it wasn't two days or two weeks or two months. It was two years. Uh, but he didn't know how to have the conversation. And so he called the former rector of ours from Notre Dame, Father Pete and said, Hey, FP, this is like lived in our dorm freshman year and like dealt with our early behavioral misunderstandings. He was like, Hey, uh, FP, um, quick question. Uh, does the church have any like meditation stuff? Because, um, you know, I like meditation, but I'm looking for something Catholic to see if God's real.

And probably God bless him, just laughed out loud and said, Alex, I don't know how many classes you slept through while you were here, but we've been doing this for like over 2000 years. It's called prayer. And you should like really know how to do that. And he's like, great, but where do I get started? So he pointed them in the, you know, the catechism describes three expressions of prayer, vocal prayer, meditation, contemplation. He points them in the direction of meditative prayer broadly and Lectio Divina specifically, meditating on scripture.

And so generally, if anybody is unfamiliar with Alexio de Vina, you basically take an excerpt of usually scripture or the words of a saying, and you repeat it slowly and repetitively until, you know, a word, an image, an idea jumps out at you. And then you just take whatever that is and offer it up to God in prayer. And so he Googles four steps to Alexio de Vina, takes his now wife's Bible off the shelf, opens to a random page, grabs a paragraph, happens to be Matthew six, Sermon on the Mount.

Alessandro (Hallow) (19:03.833)
where the disciples ask Lord, how should we pray? And his response is the Lord's prayer. And the word that jumped out to him to meditate on was hallow, from hallowed be thy name. And had no idea what the word meant, even though he'd said it a bunch, so he Googles quickly, like, what does hallow mean? It means to make holy. And had offered up in prayer, like, Lord, what do you want me to know in this, like, how do I make your name holy?

The Manly Catholic (19:04.91)
Wow.

Alessandro (Hallow) (19:30.233)
Um, was overwhelmed in this deeply transcendent contemplative experience felt God's overwhelming presence with him in that moment, um, broke down into tears, uh, and had this intense desire, um, and kindled in his heart to try and figure out how to love him back basically. So he goes on Amazon, like buys like 22 books on like every like mystical tradition and St. Teresa of Avalos, St. John of the cross Ignatius loyal, uh, Carmelite spirituality, desert fathers.

just goes down the rabbit hole and starts reading and discovering all the beautiful mystical traditions of the church and meditative traditions. A couple Sundays later, I, as the faithful Italian of the group, you know, would, and I apologize if you can hear the noise. We just got hit with a massive hailstorm, so hopefully we don't cut to black here. I know the podcast. Okay, perfect. Yeah, so.

The Manly Catholic (20:16.43)
It's all good, man. Oh gosh. Oh no. You're fine, Alessandro, don't worry about it.

Alessandro (Hallow) (20:29.497)
You know, we're at my house one Sunday, I would host like Sunday dinners for friends and the girlfriends and wives every once in a while. He's like, hey man, like you're Catholic, how'd you learn how to pray? It's like, without me knowing what he had just like, been through on this journey. And I was like, well, you know, my mom, my nonna taught me these various things, memorized the words before bed, before meals. Sister Rita at school, Father Mahoney at church, you know, all these things. It's like, okay, when's the last time you learned a new way to pray?

I said, I don't know. Senior year of high school I took Latin one, so I had to memorize the Paternoster and the Ave Maria. That's gotta count for something. He looked at me kind of strangely. He was like, okay, not exactly what I was asking, but sure. Do you know what Lexio Divina is? I said, no. He said, do you know what the examin is? I said, no. He said, do you even know what the rosary is? I said, yes, I know what the rosary is. He's like, okay. Yeah, he's like, one for three, not great.

The Manly Catholic (21:06.862)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

The Manly Catholic (21:25.356)
I that one.

Alessandro (Hallow) (21:28.377)
He said, well, you should really try these things out. I was a little nervous because the last thing he recommended opened up like Pandora's box of anxieties in my life, like big questions I was running away from. But he was like, no, no, no, this is Catholic, you'll like it, you'll be fine. So I started doing Lexio in the morning and examined in the evening. And they immediately clicked as the tools that I was missing to search for the answers of those big scary questions that I had been running away from. Like not in this big, like overwhelming, inaccessible way like.

what am I supposed to do with my life? But like here now on like a Tuesday afternoon, like what do you want from me today? Like here now in a personal, like peer to peer way. And that was revolutionary for me in my prayer life. Eric, our third co -founder of the broader founding team, we're starting to talk more as friends and like, hey, did you hear about, did you know about this? Did you know about, you know, St. Teresa of Appalachia's work here or St. John the Cross and that or?

Hey, did you know what the Desert Fathers would do all day long, finding all these things? And the more we're discovering all these different approaches to prayer, tazay, chant, reflective prayer, we were like, wouldn't it be awesome if instead of buying all these books, reading all these blogs, trying to find all this random stuff, open our eyes, turn the page, close our eyes, like they'll do all these things, we could be guided in the same audio guided way that any secular meditation mindfulness apps.

for an authentic Catholic prayer. And so Alex coded a super simple version really for us, just for him and his own life. Here's like nine basic things we've really liked over the past couple months. We'll have some friends with some decent voices, like record them. We can go off the tangent at some point if you want to on like what we've learned about audio as a medium and how much voices matter, but rejected most of all of our friends from recording and then found...

The Manly Catholic (23:24.652)
the

Alessandro (Hallow) (23:25.497)
two good ones that were good. And then just started using it ourselves. The more time we spent on it, our friends and family wanted to like check out this thing we were spending a bunch of time on. So, you know, over the summer of 2018, there's like a hundred -ish people using this just private, what we now call our beta version. But it was really over the course of that summer that we saw just the amazing fruits of grace that came into their lives.

The Manly Catholic (23:46.094)
Mm -hmm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (23:55.001)
from just committing to five or 10 minutes a day of daily prayer. And that was really the moment that hit us like a rock on the back of the head from God. Like, hey guys, instead of thinking about like, what is discernment? Why don't you actually do some? Why don't you actually think about this? And so we took it to prayer. There's a bunch of side stories here that I'm happy to go into, but got a pretty clear call to like, go help the world pray. And so walked into my partner's office a couple of Mondays later and just quit to go build a prayer app, which was a...

Unconventional decisions to say the least. And that was about five years ago. So we had that first conversation on Lexa to Vena around February, March ish of 2018. And by December of 2018, we had quit our jobs were in the app store. So like nine, 10 months start to finish, which is pretty quick. And, you know, praise be to God. Five years later, we've just been overwhelmed with many, many unexpected blessings. Yeah. I just give you.

quick stats and then I'll stop this monologue. But we just hit something like 17 million downloads across 150 countries. The app's been used to pray over 400 million times. We're available in over seven languages and full teams, like mid -80s full -time. A couple dozen additional part -time contractors across 10 countries really building to serve the global church. And it's just been a really, really wild ride. So.

The Manly Catholic (25:00.622)
Mm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (25:23.737)
A lot of directions we can go in. Happy to talk about anything. I'm an open book.

The Manly Catholic (25:25.45)
Yeah, but yeah, Alessandro, I mean, I guess I didn't realize you guys only launched in 2018. I mean, that is incredible. I mean, clearly seeing the Holy Spirit working through you guys. I mean, it's so funny, too. You're hearing stories like you guys and, you know, the little that we can offer God if we just give it. I mean, it's just a simple God. Like, what do you want me like? Hello. Like, what does that mean? Like, how do you want me to to glorify your name or to honor your name? And then it

turns into this incredible thing. I mean, you weren't from working on Wall Street to nine months later, you quit your job and you're working on an app, a prayer app. I mean, how crazy is that? But I do wanna ask, and I do hear the hail picking up, so. No, you're totally fine. But no, I do wanna ask, because you brought up a very important point, because one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, okay, so you mentioned Headspace and one other one too, but though Headspace I think is the most.

Alessandro (Hallow) (26:07.097)
Okay.

The Manly Catholic (26:22.702)
popular common one for the secular so to speak for meditation because I think most people have heard of meditation and you brought up a point too on sort of the dangers of looking inwardly too much because I think meditation too because like you said obviously the physical benefits lowers your blood pressure decreases your stress all incredible benefits but you know like you said sort of the secular version it's almost like really looking inwardly which which

The main difference obviously with hallow is that you're looking outwardly to God. So maybe explain what you have found because it sounds like you guys have done a ton of research on this stuff too when you guys were going through this kind of trial and error in this journey of maybe the dangers of the sort of secular meditation where if you can get to that extreme and why hallow offers something more beneficial.

Alessandro (Hallow) (27:15.769)
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm pulling a subnet up here. I got some quotes I can include. So I don't really talk about like what I do at HALA, but for the first two years, I basically, I basically, no, no, I'm only bringing it up in that it'll be relevant to this. So my title is technically CFO. So I make sure, oh, whatever, we don't run out of money and the balance sheet balances and all that, that fun stuff. But for the first two years, I did all basically of our direct to consumer customer acquisitions, like marketing stuff, which I knew.

The Manly Catholic (27:20.782)
Oh yeah.

The Manly Catholic (27:24.236)
Oh yeah, what do you do at Hello Alisontra?

Alessandro (Hallow) (27:45.593)
grand total of zero things about, but it's amazing what you can learn on YouTube and the internet. So kind of figured that out. Eventually hired a head of marketing that actually knew what he was doing, which was great for everybody involved. And then the past three years have built up really our relationship kind of with the institutions of church. And one of the main things we've built is a Halifor Schools program where we work with a couple hundred schools across the country now.

The Manly Catholic (27:58.86)
Including yourself.

Alessandro (Hallow) (28:12.057)
Um, incorporating prayer as kind of the foundational posture of the community, like growing and prayer together. And so I've spent probably 80 % of my time in the last three years in and around Catholic schools, leading a teacher education and events within schools on this, this topic of like. The Catholic meditation versus mindfulness, like how does one pray different types of prayer? And so, um, you know, one of the things I often talk about, you know, if you ask a hundred different people, like what is meditation, you're probably going to get.

a hundred very different answers. And I think one of the things that has been unfortunate in the past, especially the last decade where kind of mindfulness has really taken off in the West and in the United States is that this idea of meditation now has this connotation of, you know, being like Eastern spirituality or like a new age year, whatever. One of the maybe surprising pieces that many Catholics don't realize is that in part four of the catechism, which is on the Christian life of prayer,

And if we're thinking about what are the big pillars of life, there are four parts of the catechism and the fourth part is on the Christian life of prayer. So it's like, this is important. It actually lays out, there's five different types of prayer and three different expressions of prayer. One of them is meditation, full stop. So there certainly is a very authentic form of meditation. So we as Catholics should not be like, Catholics are not allowed to meditate. Mindfulness, a lot of different definitions.

I generally talk about us having two kind of central elements. So if you Google around like what is mindfulness, you'll get a bunch of different stuff, but they tend to have two core elements to the definition. One is a posture of being in the present moment. The step one being in the here and now, not letting anxieties about tomorrow or yesterday or whatever overwhelm you. And the second part is embracing what's usually described as an attitude of non -judgment. I use that language a lot.

Um, you know, kind of letting, like, if you have an idea or anxiety pop up, like imagine a flowing river next to you and like, you place that anxiety on a log and you let it like float away or like put it into imaginary cabinet and like close the door or something. So those two elements, um, the first one is really good and important. The second one can be somewhat problematic. And so, um, when we think about a Catholic approach to meditation,

Alessandro (Hallow) (30:37.913)
We do need to be in the here and the now, right? So, you know, there's great books like the miracle, the present moment. The now, the present is the only time we can exercise our will, right? Which is another way of saying it's the only time we can say yes to God. So an overly fixated view of the future or the past is not good. And so being in the present moment, you see that throughout the lives of the saints, right? And the works even in the gospel, like let tomorrow.

worry about tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow will bring its own anxieties. That part's good. The problematic part is this attitude of non -judgment or like this, like dissolving into the nothingness of the universe. Like that's not good. The metaphor I use here is like the distinction is living a kind of virtuous life focused on God. On God is like sailing from point A to B on a ship. You need two things. One, you need there not to be a hurricane.

because if there's a hurricane, you're going to toss and turn about and you're not going to be able to get anywhere. But the second thing that's equally important is a compass or GPS or some way to navigate to the specific place you want to go. And so you can imagine yourself out in the middle of the ocean. No land in sight, the sun's directly above you, perfectly calm day, but you don't have a map or a compass or GPS. That is in some ways just as scary.

The Manly Catholic (31:50.414)
Hmm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (32:06.161)
And overwhelming as like being tossed and turned around a hurricane because you don't actually know what to do You have the capability of doing anything but like you don't know what to do in Catholic meditation We bring the true north of Christ so to speak and we orient Ourselves towards his well, so there's always that exterior orientation in in Catholic meditation I'll read you a couple quotes from the catechism here on meditation, so this is

Paragraph starting 2700, or yeah, 2700. Meditation is above all a quest. The mind seeks to understand the why and the how of Christian life in order to adhere and respond to what the Lord is asking. To the extent that we are humble and faithful, we discover in meditation the movements that stir the heart and we are able to discern them. Meditation engages thought, imagination, emotion, and desire.

This mobilization of faculties is necessary in order to deepen our convictions of faith, prompt the conversion of our heart." End quote. So there you get a very different description than what we sometimes think of this like mindfulness inward, like just kind of dissolving kind of posture. Meditation is actually very active, right? The Catechism describes it as a quest, right? We're out there trying to figure out, we take the truth of the faith. So for example, in Lectio Divina,

We take the truth of the faith in the form of the written word of God. And we ask, okay, what does this mean for me in the here and the now in my day? And I think that's in part why it was so powerful for us in our lives. Like we had never asked that question. Like the Lord wants to, wants us to ask that question. He is there waiting to engage with us on that level. Um, I would also call out that we sometimes get weirded out as Catholics is like breathing exercises or like, um,

Imagine yourself in the scene or something like that. I think the catechism does a good job here reminding us that like we are incarnate beings given five senses by God so as to be able to know Him through His creation and so we do use all of those faculties our imagination our emotion our desires our physical senses in order to be able to engage more deeply into the reality that God has created for us and our search for His will in our lives.

Alessandro (Hallow) (34:27.193)
but always in that external questing posture towards relationship, not inward, away from.

The Manly Catholic (34:34.67)
Yeah, and one thing that I found too, Alessandro, is that's been just incredibly impactful for me with the app is, you know, being able to learn new forms of prayer, like you mentioned, but then hearing, because I know you guys have audiobooks on there too, and you have Bible stories, you have sleep stories, you have all these incredible resources for people from all walks of life, whether you're just learning about Catholicism or you've been a Catholic for, you know, 60 years.

And I found, too, what's been been really helpful is is the variety of options that people can have to. And again, the way the app is laid out as well as so organized, it's so easy to search. And there's so many different things like my my son, my oldest son, he he's listening to all the the Saints Alive, the radio theater that you guys put together, which is just I mean, it's incredible because like I'm listening to him like, oh, this is actually like a really cool story, you know, and it's it's engaging. And I know some.

people struggle. I find it helpful. I know some people struggle if they're praying and having someone talk to them as well. But you actually have options for that too, where it's like mostly silence. Some people, someone pops up and they might give you some cues of like where to go with your, your meditation as well. But there's, there's so much, it really has deepened my prayer life as well. Because I remember too, I learned the, it was with Jim Caviezel. He did, oh what, it was with the St. Michael.

and the Archangels. It was a novena to them. I believe it was like last year or two years ago. And I have never even heard of that. So I'm learning all these different traditions and these liturgies and things I would have never heard of because there's the Catholic tradition as you know, 2000 plus years. There's so many different ways to pray and it's so rich in tradition. So I want to kick kind of that back to you. I mean, obviously comment on anything I said, but how do you guys...

Alessandro (Hallow) (36:04.537)
Hmm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (36:25.377)
Yeah.

The Manly Catholic (36:29.78)
sifts through the thousands and millions of prayers and litanies and I'm sure you get feedback from listeners as well to add new content because you guys are constantly adding and this Lent is incredible too that you guys have done. It's just, I'm sure it can be a bit overwhelming for you guys at times.

Alessandro (Hallow) (36:47.353)
Yeah, thank God I'm not on the content team. They do really important work that I'm not sure I'd be able to. So yeah, I think maybe a couple of things just as an intro. So obviously no one needs an after -pray, or at least hopefully that's obvious. We're certainly not trying to create that impression in the world. In the same way that you don't need a physical trainer or gym membership to be physically fit, right? But...

it can often be helpful to have a trainer who knows a bunch of stuff or equipment that can like, you know, focus your energy in certain movements. Um, that can be really helpful. And so I think that's what we're trying to be that, that, um, tool that can help you discover, learn, build, um, either the, the, the, you know, the words, the posture, the accountability even, right? Just having something there to remind you. Um,

So it's certainly not necessary, but we just want to be a tool to the extent that it's helpful. There is a lot of stuff. I think one of the things we've learned that is not good when someone is learning to pray or maybe a reason why people don't pray anymore is that they felt that or got the impression that like prayer is a thing and they did that one thing and it didn't really click with them. And so they kind of threw the baby out with the bath water and said, Oh, prayer doesn't work for me. Something like that.

I think that's a real shame. You know, we hear in First Thessalonians chapter five, rejoice, always pray without ceasing. We have prayed and continue to pray a lot about that. Like, what does that mean to pray without ceasing? And if we think about prayer as the, like words we say, or even the time we spend listening to God, like that's literally impossible. Like you gotta eat, you gotta take care of the kids, you gotta do podcasting, you gotta do audio editing, right? You you know, do leg day.

You gotta do all the things, like how is that possible? But if we think about prayer as a relationship, and as the Catechism describes it, the lifting of one's heart and soul to God in all things, we realize it's really about converting your life into a journey in partnership with God. And I think that's partly what our mission is to help people understand the expanse of what prayer is and the way to bring different language, experience, emotion into prayer.

Alessandro (Hallow) (39:07.321)
And so in the same way that my tone and diction and lexicon changes and here with you on this podcast, then I would with my friends on Call of Duty, then I would with wife on date night, right? Like we use different words and communicate differently at different points in time. The same is true with our relationship with God, right? Different things for different times. And so there's now over 10 ,000 things in the app. The idea is to be able to...

meet each person where they are. We use that expression a lot in ministry. When we use it, we try and mean two things. One is literally and physically on the places that you spend a lot of time, i .e. like digital spaces for your phone. But then metaphysically, like regardless of where you are in your spiritual journey, whether you've never prayed before, haven't prayed in a long time, are intimidated by it, feel like you don't know the words, or feel like you have a pretty decent pair of life but want to learn something new.

God is always there for you no matter what. And so the idea with the app is to try and present something that can meet you in that space. And so the content roadmap for Halo is as long as the list of possible human experience. So we'll keep building that and a lot of our best ideas come from our users. So if you have a great idea, please let us know what it is and we'll hopefully try and build it for you. There's a practical reality of like, there's only so many hours in a day and so many people in the team. So it might take us a little while.

But the consequence of that is a different technical problem of, okay, you don't want to feel like you're walking into the cereal aisle at the grocery store, where you're just so overwhelmed with a million different options. We try and do this a bit, and certainly we can do better, and we'll get better over time. But that personalization aspect of feeling like the Netflix home screen where it's just right for you and everyone's looks different, that's something we'll work on over time as we keep adding more and more stuff. But it's really about...

The Manly Catholic (40:54.722)
Hmm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (41:01.785)
whatever you're going through, whatever you wanna learn about coming and having a non -judgmental place, to be able to grow without the stress of like, am I doing it right? I think I touched on most of the things you said, but.

The Manly Catholic (41:13.934)
Yes, you did. Yeah. And I want to ask you to because you mentioned this in kind of when you you guys were first starting, you had all your friends try to record stuff and you realize you needed to fire all your friends. And I laughed at that. But there is something to even just learning about podcasting, because I know nothing about audio, you know, going into this. But there's something that is very important about having, especially when you're doing something like meditation, is having a voice that is.

is soothing or that the listener can connect to as well. So I'm sure you guys have learned a ton about this as well. Maybe kind of go through that process too. Like why did you realize that your friends sounded terrible and they needed to fire them? And how did you guys then strive to look for real talent? Because obviously now you guys have, you know, it seems like pretty much any one you guys want because, you know, the list of guests and everything is endless. But it really is something that I'm sure you guys have thought a lot about and maybe kind of.

walk us through a little bit of that process of transitioning to that.

Alessandro (Hallow) (42:15.641)
Yeah, it is, it is fun. I think so we average a couple hundred applications per job opening that we put up, which is its own form of purgatory. But the, uh, we're certainly blessed, blessed to have this many applicants and would certainly love more and more people to keep applying. Uh, it's just really hard. Well, no, it's just really hard. It's mostly hard when you have a lot of really qualified people and only like one job, right? Like that's a hard position to be in, but, um,

The Manly Catholic (42:30.286)
Oh

The Manly Catholic (42:34.51)
That's purgatory is going through all the paperwork, right? Yeah, absolutely. Right.

Alessandro (Hallow) (42:45.753)
By far the job we get the most applications for is voices. I think people love the idea of like, I can get up and like speak into a microphone and just go home and get paid. That sounds great. Yeah. So early on there was, we thought we were going to go in one direction and then we learned that that was absolutely the wrong direction. And then I've since changed course. So that might be an interesting story to share. So we knew early on that voices mattered in audio where like we ourselves consume.

And this would have been, you know, 2018. So, you know, podcasts wasn't, weren't as huge as they were today or they are today. And so, you know, listening to YouTube and things, we knew like crappy voice, crappy audio was not good. We didn't really know what that meant. But from the very beginning, we knew, particularly when it comes to prayer, we were going to have at least like a male voice and a female voice. Like that distinction, you know, mattered.

just in our own lives, preference wise, and we knew that that was probably true for most people. And so we just got as many people as would be willing to take samples and be open to the idea of reading some things. And then we just surveyed them all and everybody rated them. And it was just like this idea that there is some form of a platonic form of a voice. And so we're like, okay, we'll get started with this minimal thing, because it's just for us anyway. Who really cares? It is...

I'm sure you experienced this all the time, like listening to yourself talk on a microphone is very hard. So like I, for example, many others opted out and like, there's no way my voice is good enough. But anyway, we had some friends. We found too that everybody could really, actually there is one interesting story there. So we were really struggling at the very beginning with a male voice, trying to find a male voice. Female voice, shout out Abby, is my freshman year roommate's wife. So.

The Manly Catholic (44:38.382)
She made the she made the list

Alessandro (Hallow) (44:42.585)
She crushed it. She happened to study theology and then was basically our early theology person and now spends more time with the family. But so thank God for Joe and thank God for Abby. But the male voice was a bit harder. So Alex was praying about it one day and he's like, Lord, we just can't find a male voice. They just like all suck. Like, why is this hard? Please help us find somebody. And so he was in a mass praying about it and just this name popped into his head. Francis.

And it was someone who were like sort of new freshman year at college. This would have been like five or six years later. And, um, or no more than that, like seven or eight years later, like, haven't really kept in touch. You didn't know what he was doing, but he knew one mutual friend that was involved. He was like, that's weird, but like, I don't know, maybe that's a sign or something. So we each other like, Hey, like what is Francis doing? Does anybody know where Francis is? Turns out he was in the seminary and was like working with his, um, you know,

director on like what ministry efforts he should be building into his life as a seminarian and We like hey, can you send in like a audio recording of you reading this part of like Matthew? He's like what? So he did it and he has like the most tranquil people peaceful boys Mike. This is it like this is the voice took it to his spiritual director or formational director and Seminary and he was on board so

That was a very clear like, Lord, please give us someone. And then like, boom, Francis. So that was great. After that though, we, the idea was that let's find like the best voice in the world and have that be the voice. And so that was kind of the logic that we were going down. What we ended up finding out is that there is not a platonic form of a voice. There is a large spectrum of personal preference.

And so the goal is not to have the best voice, but a sufficiently diverse and good set of options so that everyone can find someone that they like. So we now have four voices, two male, two female, one of which is Jonathan Rumi, one of whom is Jonathan Rumi who plays Jesus in the chosen and one's a British female voice. We may add a few more over time and certainly internationally, we have different voices and our different influencer partners, but it was interesting to realize that there is.

Alessandro (Hallow) (47:08.471)
No matter what voice it is, you put it out there. There's some people that are going to like absolutely be passionately in love and others that like absolutely passionately want to crucify you. And the most disheartening thing when it comes to audio is like, we work really hard to have like real humans doing everything. We don't do any AI on this kind of stuff or like whatever. And sometimes people are just like, this voice is so bad. This is so clearly a computer. And I can't believe that you would put this in the app. We're like, oh no, please don't let whoever's.

The Manly Catholic (47:36.142)
Oh, wow.

Alessandro (Hallow) (47:38.425)
is that see that customer feedback. But I can assure you that they are all real people.

The Manly Catholic (47:45.038)
Oh my gosh, that's incredible. Yeah, that's, but yeah, it's, it is hard. And that's again, the perks of having so many people that you can go to now, as well as that, yeah, because there's, you know, Bishop Baron, Father Mike Schmitz, Jim Caviezel. I mean, there's all these incredible people, because most people have heard him. It's very, you know, I know Matt Fradd does a, I love Pipe Smith Aquinas. He does a sleep story and, you know, Christophonik does some stuff too, but you know, it's...

Alessandro (Hallow) (48:12.377)
Stay tuned if you like Matt, there'll be some exciting stuff coming out in the future with him. So just, I'll plant that here.

The Manly Catholic (48:20.206)
Are you able to tell us or is it just a plant? Is it just a seed you're gonna throw out there?

Alessandro (Hallow) (48:25.433)
There will be some bigger stuff, some bigger stuff more than a sleep story. I will at the same time not throw him under the bus, but call out the fact that he agreed to do the Bible sleep story as long as it was the song of songs. And so I personally think that's an interesting choice to end your day in prayer, but you know, to each their own, and it certainly is the word of God. So.

The Manly Catholic (48:50.094)
You know, those Aussies, man, those Aussies. I don't know what's going on over there in Australia. But hey, if you want an Australian voice, Matt Fred, he is pleasant to listen to, I must say. But no, so I want to switch gears a little bit, Alessandro, because, you know, some, obviously the show, The Manly Catholic, you know, is tailored towards men. So for you, give, I guess, your sales pitch for men as well, for maybe men who are listening to this. Maybe if they've ever heard of the Halo app and they're really interested.

Alessandro (Hallow) (48:59.961)
Yeah.

The Manly Catholic (49:18.158)
What would you say would be like your, I don't know if I your go -to, but what would you say would be like the easiest way for a man to connect in the Halo app as far as prayer and really just, I wanna dive in, I don't know where to start, I don't know where to go, where do I go from here?

Alessandro (Hallow) (49:36.537)
Yeah, I'll give two of my answers that I give relatively frequently as good places to start, and then I'll give one particularly tailored to men in this context, whether you're single or married or anything else, priest. I think as men, we tend to have a hard time admitting when we're like, don't know what we're doing.

or I have personally found, I don't know that this is true of all men, that in my relationships with one another, even occasionally like marriage, hard to pray together in person with each other. Obviously there's things like group rosaries and things that make it a little easier when there's room to hide. But...

that in the comfort of your own car while you're driving or those minutes at the end of the day when everyone else is asleep or the minutes in the morning before anyone else is up, like just prioritizing that one -on -one time with God and having that be the foundation of your day, I guarantee you your days will go differently. If you do that, I tend to be a morning prayer person more than a nighttime prayer person. Everybody can have their own time of day, but like finding that time that works for you.

Um, my days are markedly different when I don't start it in the way I want to than when I do. And so there's a message of hope. Like you'll be amazing how much extra stuff you get done. I think we tend to think of like, Oh, we don't have time. I got all these other things. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. Like you don't need to know what you're doing. Do what I'm about to tell you. Press play for five or 10 minutes, close your eyes and like if you do it for 30 days and if your life's not different, download the app and tell everybody the, or delete the app and tell everyone that it sucks. But I'm pretty sure that won't happen.

Um, the first one is Lectio Divina. So that's where we got started and it was massively life -changing for me. I think sometimes we can fall into this trap of like scripture is like this 2000 year old like book of like aphorisms or truths, but it is actually the living word of God, right? There's a reason why at the mass there are two liturgies or the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Eucharist. Those are like, I don't want to say equivalent because

Alessandro (Hallow) (51:56.377)
Jesus is actually there in the second part, but God is there in both places, right? And it is his word. I think one of the most light bulb moments for me in the development of my own prayer life, and remember I've been like running from these problems because I didn't feel like I knew how to even ask the question. If you, particularly using Lectio Divina, but if you ask like, what are you revealing to me in this, even if you just do it on the daily gospel, and that's what I would recommend you do, five or 10 minutes daily gospel reflection, Jonathan Rumi will read the.

their gospel today and then give some prompted reflection questions. You will be amazed at how specific God will be with you in what he's revealing. Now, we don't have moments of just consolation for our whole lives and it's like, God does not speak clearly to me or anyone else every day all the time, but you will be surprised at how clearly over time you will develop direction in your life. So that's thing number one.

The second one, and I've had different seasons where this has been more central in my life and less central, but the examine is a really powerful tool, particularly if you're getting started in like a prayer life. The examine comes out of technically predates Ignatius of Loyola, but popularized and certainly the Jesuits, if anybody has an exposure to Jesuits, it's core to their life. So it's meant to be done daily, but could also be done at the end of a week or something. You might be familiar with the examination.

Conscience which is a specific form of an exam in type of prayer But generally there's five or six steps depending on how you count the silence at the end and you basically at the end of the day sit down and you replay your day like a movie in your mind and Just start with a morning. What happened? Who'd you see? What'd you do? Going into the middle of the day afternoon There's literally dozens of ways of different things you can focus on but generally you're looking for what the Jesus would call moments of

consolation or desolation. So like joys or struggles, high points, low points, moments where you experienced God's presence and recognized it, moments where looking back, maybe you see it, but didn't at the moment or like places of struggle of sin, whatever, whatever those are, whatever jump out to you as you replay it, you offer those up to God and you ask Lord, like give me the strength to do better tomorrow. Lord, thank you for this gift.

Alessandro (Hallow) (54:19.929)
Thank you for being in this moment. Sorry for not seeing you there. Like whatever the context of the day was, but basically look for him in your day and then respond to him based on whatever you realized. I should have said, you start with a posture of thanksgiving. So thank you Lord for the day. Thank you for the gifts. Focusing on gratitude enters you into the posture of humility, which is necessary for all prayer. But then you read, do all the replaying. You do the end and at the end you rest with God in the state of contemplation.

The exam is great because it trains the muscle in your soul to recognize God's presence in your life. We sometimes don't take enough time. We all, I certainly do not take enough time to recognize his presence in your life. But the more you look for him retrospectively, like in the past day, the more you become attuned to kind of what that feels like. You also develop this understanding that like,

The more you look for him, the more he's there because he's there all the time. And the more you recognize that it's easier to walk with him during the next day. And so you kind of train yourself like Pavlovianly to like be always looking and realizing he's there. And that can be really powerful for a man who may more identify God as like during that hour on Sundays or daily mass or whatever. He's like all the time, including right now, right here. The last one I will say, particularly for men, is the surrendered novena.

It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do. Um, right up there with like the litany of humility, which you should also do. But, um, as men, particularly, you know, people, you know, going to the gym, getting after it, listening to Jaco, like all the things we can sometimes feel like it's on our shoulders and we really need to be strong and we need to carry the weight of whatever it is going on in our families and our professional lives and whatever. We do need to do our part.

The Manly Catholic (55:48.62)
Hmm.

The Manly Catholic (55:55.566)
Yeah.

The Manly Catholic (56:02.762)
Thank you.

Alessandro (Hallow) (56:17.209)
But we can't do anything without God. And if there's one thing we've learned the most and Alex, my co -founder is really, really great about talking about this and embracing this on a daily life with the business is like our fundamental decision needs to be to surrender to the will of God. He's going to lead us where he wants us. And as long as we're doing the thing we're supposed to be doing, he's going to give us what we need to get through it. And that is a really freeing.

The Manly Catholic (56:30.126)
Hmm.

Alessandro (Hallow) (56:46.777)
Um, realization that it's not all on our shoulders. Like we got to do the work, right? We still have to do all the things we're called to, but God's ultimately there giving us what we need to get through and knowing that no matter what it is, we're going to have what we need and that he's going to be there to help and support us. Um, was a, the, the realization for me that allowed me to walk into my boss's office and quit on a random Monday and give up their significantly six figure job to go build a prayer app. Um,

And it will be whatever you're being called to, like you will find peace in that decision as well as the strength to actually get it done. So I would encourage this.

The Manly Catholic (57:28.046)
Yeah, those I mean, all three of those were incredible suggestions. I have a quick story to you about the Serenno Novena. So I was with my spiritual director and I had never heard of the Serenno Novena before and he was telling me about it. And he said, you know, I heard about it, but I didn't really haven't really done it before. And then I was on he was on a spiritual retreat and he was talking with some priests and he said, yeah, like he was talking to a fellow priest in his bishop. This priest bishop encouraged him.

and all of his priests to do the Serenadu Novena. And so he basically said this priest was sharing a story. He did it. And it was like on day eight or nine. So he's finishing it up. And he was, I think he was doing his holy hour in front of the Eucharist. And basically he heard a voice in his head. And this was my spiritual director telling me, he basically said, it was Jesus telling him, he's like, finally, now I can do what I need to do.

He's like, you have given it all to me and basically, you know, saying that we often we think we're helping but we're actually hindering what God wants for us. And, you as men, we're men of action, like you said, you know, we want to do all these things, we want to carry the weight of the world on our backs. But God is saying, you know, surrender it all to me, for my burden is easy, my yoke is light. And how often we forget that as men, because again, we're doers and that God made us that way too. But at the same time, it has to be in conjunction with His will. Because if you're not if you're

button heads with God. I who do you think is going to win every single time? It's it's pretty easy. The answer to that. I do want to add one more to that I found really helpful, especially men who maybe are like men of action and things like that. But Father Lampert series, the spiritual warfare series that you guys had to I thought was extremely helpful, very informative and Father Lampert, if you guys have not heard him speak, he is like the calmest human being and he just walks into exorcisms and he's

You know, he's like the calmest person you'd ever want on your side. I've interviewed him twice. I love that man. He is such an incredible one, but he he did I think it was a nine or ten part series for you guys. And that's you just type in Father Lampert or you can type in spiritual warfare series. And that was incredible as well. So I'd highly recommend that too. So, yeah.

Alessandro (Hallow) (59:38.649)
Yeah, it's a great one. Really powerful and something that we probably don't think enough about. You know, I think this is C .S. Lewis line that said there's two lies that the devil will try and tell. One that he doesn't exist or one to be overly fixated on him. And a healthy appreciation for the fact that spiritual warfare is real and understanding its dynamics and the things we open ourselves up to in certain ways.

The Manly Catholic (59:58.99)
Right.

Alessandro (Hallow) (01:00:08.537)
how to remain focused on Christ and fight those spiritual battles is a tough balance to strike, but the one we do need to do, because the more we do for Christ, the more we're gonna be in the enemy's sights.

The Manly Catholic (01:00:24.672)
Amen. Amen. Well, I can't believe it's already been an hour, Alessandro. This has been a very exciting conversation. So thank you so much for your time. I'll kind of kick it back to you. Any final thoughts? Obviously, where our listeners can download the app, where they can find more information about Halo and any maybe future endeavors that Halo is going to undergo that you want to share with our audience before we let you go.

Alessandro (Hallow) (01:00:45.689)
Sure. Yeah. And thanks. Sorry for droning on. I know I went long. Couple of my answers. Yeah, no, it's been really awesome. If, you know, like I said, you don't need an app to pray, but to the extent you think it might be useful or helpful to learn some new things or have some structure, you know, we'd love to be able to serve you in that way. You can go to our website, hallow .com, H -A -L -L -O -W .com or search hallow in the Apple app store or Google play store, or I think technically there's an Amazon play store. So you can.

The Manly Catholic (01:00:49.268)
Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. Don't worry about it.

Alessandro (Hallow) (01:01:15.897)
do that as well. Or you could type Catholic will be the first thing that pops up on any of those as well. It's the purple background with a little white dot with a halo over top, which doesn't help with our pronunciation issues of halo versus halo, but you know, c 'est la vie. Yeah, no, you know, we, you know, we're five years in, we have a bunch of stuff in prayer. We'll continue building that out. You know, over time, you'll certainly see us grow and trying to help you not just in your...

personal prayer life, which is important, but also helping you bring you into the fullness of community life and sacramental life. The most important part of your prayer life is never going to be in Hallow, right? That happens at the altar. And so we're going to be trying to do more to support, you know, connections to things like local parishes, bringing people in schools, parishes, RCIA, OCIA now, I guess, together. And so community stuff, you'll see more community stuff from us.

And if you know any other languages or want to help us grow internationally, please check our job board and we'll continue to be growing there. Otherwise, please pray for us. We can certainly use the prayers. Please know that we'll be praying for you.

The Manly Catholic (01:02:26.606)
Well, thank you again, Alessandro, so much. Thank you all so much for listening. Everything that Alessandro mentioned, I'll put links in the show notes. I was going to include some guides for you guys. There's some really good information out there on Lactio Divina, which I'd be happy to include for you guys in the show notes as well to make it a little easier. Just click on the link. But thank you all so much again for listening. Alessandro, again, thank you so much for your time and all the work that you and the team do at Halle, you guys have done an incredible job. And I can't wait to see all the content that comes out in the future.

But until next time everyone, go out there and be a saint.