This issue, I’m dedicating this space to two important pieces of housekeeping—The Catholic Echo Column and our upcoming email newsletter.
By the time you’re reading this, The Catholic Echo will have launched an online-exclusive column, featuring regular contributions from our writers. Topics range from personal reflections to Catholic tips to sports and popular culture. Our first two columns center around 1) how the Church has welcomed a record number of Catholics across the U.S. this year, and 2) tips for engaging with friends and family who have fallen away from the Church. Both our staff writers—Collin Vogt and Pete Sheehan—are regular contributors. Theresa Breitenbach, our new communications strategist, also contributes, and so does our long-time copy editor, Linda Bader. We’ll also have guest contributors from time to time! You can find it at www.CatholicEcho.org.
I feel like I’ve been talking about this forever (or at least since this magazine launched in 2023), but we are actually very close to launching a regular email newsletter as well. The first step is for us to build up our subscriber base, so if you’d like to sign up, please visit us at www.CatholicEcho.org/Subscribe/. I suspect the emails will begin sometime this fall.
Flipping through this issue of The Catholic Echo magazine, you’ll find many event listings. Our regular event calendar on page 6 features many golf outings, other outdoor fundraisers and feast day celebrations. On page 20, you can find a listing of parish festivals—many of our parishes rely on income from their festivals to operate throughout the year, so I do hope you’ll visit one (or two, or five) this summer! And finally, on page 24, Father Christopher Cicero explains the First Friday devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, accompanied by a listing of Friday Mass times across the diocese. You would think that summer—ordinary time— would be a slow time for the Church, but in the Diocese of Youngstown, it is the opposite. So please, if you can, take advantage of all the ways you can engage with your parish community and strengthen your faith these next few months.
Also in this issue is a feature story on the 250th anniversary of the U.S. and Catholicism’s place in the history of our great nation (page 14), an overview of the diocesan artificial intelligence conference in April (page 28) and much more besides. I hope you find something that sparks your interest!
We’ll be back in your mailboxes again in August. In the meantime, have a very happy and blessed summer.
Until next time,
Katie Wagner
