Most of this gets made after the dishes.

Homework first. Then dinner, then the dishes, then whatever the house needs that day, on top of a full-time job that pays for all of it.

What's left is the evening.

That's when the classes get written, the printables get drawn, the questions get answered, and the videos get filmed and filmed again because the first take was no good.

The same problem, circled for years

People go to Mass, and then at most parishes they go home. Sometimes doughnuts. That's often the whole structure.

It lands hardest on the people who just came in. You finish OCIA, or RCIA if that's still what it's called where you are, feeling like you'd finally arrived somewhere. Then Monday comes, the parish calendar goes back to normal, and the people who walked you through it have a new class starting and you are not in it.

It isn't only them. You can be a cradle Catholic, forty years in, and still be assembling your whole spiritual life out of podcast episodes, half-finished books, and whatever the homily happened to be about that week.

I started making videos about it. Then I made more. Those aren't enough.

AfterMass.org is the fruit of a longing that consumes me to deal with that reality.

There are a few of us now

It started with me and a camera. There are a few of us now, a small group who have been building this in the same evenings I have.

All of it happens after hours.

It's working now, and it's barely started

More classes, on the things people actually write in about. Something for the seasons, so that Advent and Lent arrive carrying more than a reminder. And a way for you to actually find each other. That was the reason I started, it's the piece I still owe you, and it takes far more hours than we have yet.

Most of our plans are not yet built. We are doing all we can with the little time we have available.

Leo XIV said something this year, preaching at Lampedusa, that I keep coming back to: that the parish in particular should be a community where, guided by the Gospel, we learn to welcome, accompany and integrate one another in a spirit of communion.

That's the shape I want this to have, and it's the part I can't build alone.

Out of the evenings and into the day

There's only so much you can do after hours.

I'd like to make AfterMass my job. Not so I can do less, but so there's more of it, much more.

The version of this I can see is bigger than a course and a shop. It's one place where formation, prayer, community and ordinary Catholic life sit together, and where the person who walked out of their parish on Monday morning has somewhere to walk to.

That's a long way off working in the evenings. But it's the direction we are trying to go, and your paid membership will help us get there faster.

The newsletter is free. The first lesson is free and needs no account at all. The printables are there whether you ever join anything or not.

Come and see what's here. Then tell me what's missing.