CHARLOTTE — When Carolina Catholic Media launched its radio station AM 1270 four years ago, it filled a huge void in Catholic radio programming in the Carolinas.
An independent station, with an affiliation with the EWTN Global Radio Network, Carolina Catholic Radio’s 10,000-watt signal spans the greater Charlotte area, transmitting faith-filled programs to listeners each day. In addition, its livestreaming and on-demand capabilities attract listeners from countries around the world, as far away as Japan and the Philippines.
Founder David Papandrea says the idea for a radio station originated from a conversation he had with Spencer Swope, EWTN’s southeast regional marketing manager, when the two met in 2015 at the Charlotte Catholic Men’s Conference.
Swope told him the only places EWTN lacked area coordinators for their media missionary outreach were in the Charlotte and Raleigh areas. Papandrea, a career broadcaster, was looking for a new challenge and believes their meeting was divine providence.
Papandrea pulled together a board of directors from parishes across the region in 2016, incorporating Carolina Catholic Radio in 2017. “Even though we have this fast growing area of Catholicism here, we were dealing with people who didn’t know anything about EWTN or Catholic radio. Everything was basically an idea for local evangelization centered on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We had to market the idea without a tangible product,” he said.
The station signed on four years ago on Jan. 31, 2019, with EWTN Radio programming, also providing local news and information for about six minutes every hour.
The first feature locally produced program to hit the airwaves with local talent was “Faith and Sport” with Dr. John Acquaviva, an author and professor of exercise science at Wingate University.
Jason Murphy, coordinator of the annual Charlotte Catholic Men’s Conference, received a call from Papandrea in 2019 shortly after the station went on air, asking Murphy to tape some promos for the conference. “I had never done that and was uncomfortable at first,” Murphy said.
Papandrea pushed him out of his comfort zone a bit further by asking him to tape a series of reflections. He also asked Murphy to consider taping a weekly program geared toward men. The overriding motivation was to challenge our men daily and not “see you at the conference next year.”
Murphy has recently taped the 110th episode of “The Obligation,” his radio show that encourages men in their faith. “Men across the country are reaching out. I like hearing their conversion stories. I’m always trying to inspire men, reach men, and reawaken in them what we are called to be as husbands, fathers and men of God,” he said.
Monsignor Patrick Winslow, vicar general and chancellor of the Diocese of Charlotte, is interviewed by Jason Murphy of Carolina Catholic Radio during “Catholic Night” at the Charlotte Knights ballpark at Truist Field on Sept. 9, 2022.St. Mark parishioners Jean Whelan and Kathleen Lewis, hosts of “Joyful Echo,” just aired their 100th episode. Friends for 25 years, the two had no experience in radio, but Papandrea learned of their love of the Catholic faith and their leadership and involvement with the Mary’s Women of Joy group at the Huntersville parish.
They were hesitant about hosting a show at first, but after much prayer and discernment, they finally gave their fiat.
“We’re very devoted to Our Lady and we are just echoing our Magnificat through the radio show,” Whelan said. “We’re not scripted at all. We speak from the heart as we tape the program.”
Lewis added that “we talk about how Jesus touches our lives and how we respond to that echo.”
Whelan said there aren’t many places in everyday life where a woman can go to hear that they are precious to God, that He delights in her. “That’s not a message out in the world. If we can be a voice that is joyfully echoing that truth to women, we are happy to do it.”
Carolina Catholic Media also expanded its reach by getting out into the community. When the Diocese of Charlotte celebrated its 50th anniversary with “Catholic Night” at Truist Field Sept. 9 last year, they broadcast live, featuring an interview with Monsignor Patrick Winslow, vicar general and chancellor of the diocese.
“We’re hoping to spearhead more ‘Catholic Night’ events at other baseball parks across the diocese in the future,” Papandrea said.
While they are expanding programming, platforms and community reach, Carolina Catholic Media has a critical need for funding. The network was hit hard by the pandemic and forced to shut down radio operations for seven months, from August 2021 through February 2022, due to insufficient funding. As events were cancelled during the pandemic, fundraising became more difficult. The team was unable to reach out into the community to capitalize on those former opportunities to generate revenue.
“We are here to reflect our beautiful Carolina Catholic community,” Papandrea said. “You can tell when people call in how much of what we do impacts them. Some are fallen away Catholics, some agnostics, atheists… People from all walks of life are finding their way to us and hearing a positive message through our seven audio and video platforms. We need more people from our parishes, schools and ministries to partner with us to continue this important work like our recent March for Life live broadcast."
— SueAnn Howell
Tune in, get involved
Local programming on 1270AM is featured daily: 1-6 p.m. on weekdays, and 9 a.m.-6 p.m. on weekends.
Download the Carolina Catholic Media app to listen to programs live and on demand including sections on Prayer and Learning. Find out more on how you can donate or get involved at www.carolinacatholicmedia.org.
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Sinner and sage
Considered one of Caravaggio’s best masterpieces, “The Entombment of Christ” was confiscated by the French for their newly opened Louvre Museum as Napoleon swept down the Italian peninsula in the late 18th century.
The painting was one of more than 100 works of art Pope Pius VI was forced to give up as part of a peace treaty between Revolutionary France and the Papal States in 1797.
However, when the masterpiece was returned in 1816, it did not end up back in its original home: a side chapel in the Oratorians’ Santa Maria in Vallicella Church, also known as “Chiesa Nuova,” in Rome. Pope Pius VII instead put it safely in his picture gallery, where it can be admired today as part of the Vatican Museums’ vast collection.
While the canvas, which measures 10 feet by 6.6 feet, survived the plunder, its deeper meaning and function as an altarpiece is usually lost on most visitors. As Quatremère de Quincy, a French architect who fiercely opposed taking art away from Italy, warned in 1796: “Eradicating the context in which a work was created irreparably impairs its legibility.”
To explain how to read Caravaggio’s piece “in situ,” the Oratorians invited Alessandro Zuccari, a leading expert on Caravaggio and professor of art history at Rome’s La Sapienza University, to give a lecture at their church on Jan. 24.
The massive oil painting was commissioned to decorate the wall above the altar in a chapel of the church. Completed in 1603, the work shows Nicodemus and the apostle John struggling with the heavy, lifeless body of Jesus to place him on an anointing stone and prepare his body for the entombment.
Caravaggio used Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica for inspiration, Zuccari said, and created a similarly striking form of Jesus draped helplessly in someone’s arms and included a similar hand holding him up, gripping his flesh by the wound on his side.
It was also a nod to his namesake, he said. Born Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio wanted to be the Michelangelo Buonarroti “of the new century” and “emulate and outdo the great masters” with his new style.
In Caravaggio’s Entombment, three women are looking on with their own personal expression of grief and different gestures of prayer: the Blessed Virgin Mary extends her arms wide like a cross, Mary Magdalene bows her head and Mary, the wife of Clopas, throws her arms up and gazes toward the heavens.
Bathed in bright light, the crucified Jesus is the painting’s focal point, but his finger is firmly touching the anointing stone below with its sharp cornerstone edge glinting in the light and jutting out toward the viewer, Zuccari said. It is the prophetic sign of victory over death in Psalm 118:22, “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
However, when the painting can be seen at the altar during Mass, the genius of Caravaggio’s composition truly comes through, Zuccari said. A copy of Caravaggio’s Entombment was put above the altar in 1797. The copy “is not exactly the best,” he said, “but it is at least useful” for getting an idea.
Father Maurizio Botta, an Oratorian priest at the parish, demonstrated the effect for Catholic News Service Jan. 25.
The painting’s cornerstone falls precisely at the center of the altar where the priest stands.
When the priest elevates the host, it appears as if he is reaching up to receive the body on the wall and suddenly, for the congregants kneeling, Nicodemus’ eyeline is focused on the host, not the viewer – both critical cues for the faithful to understand the moment.
Father Botta explained he does the same demonstration during catechism classes to show the children “the relationship between Christ’s body and him alive in the Eucharist.”
Oratorian Father Simone Raponi, the organizer of the lecture with Zuccari, told Vatican Radio that Caravaggio really understood “the modern sense of spirituality” promoted by the Oratorian’s founder St. Philip Neri.
So much attention has been given to Caravaggio’s “difficult” personality and behavior, that his reputation as “the cursed artist” or as an anti-conformist further risks “removing Caravaggio from the real authentic (artistic, spiritual and cultural) context in which his work emerges and matures,” he said Jan. 20.
“In my opinion, he understood the meaning of modern spirituality: the divine can be glimpsed in reality” and not sought out in the abstract and what is beyond this world, he said.
Caravaggio was very close to and collaborated with members of the Oratorians while in Rome, he said, and understood the order’s charism.
It is not known whether Caravaggio ever met St. Philip, who died in 1595, Father Raponi said, but there is a legendary exchange between the two, which, whether it actually occurred or not, offers a life lesson.
He said, “St. Philip tells Caravaggio: ‘I see two wolves inside of you, one fighting the other, trying to tear each other apart.’ And the painter asks: ‘Which one will win?’ St. Philip responds, ‘The one you feed more.’”
St. Philip saw faith as something that had to come from within as an intimate relationship with God and to grow by “nourishing the soul,” he said.
“So, these lights and shadows that you somehow find in Caravaggio’s paintings, these two wolves, perhaps, that struggle, St. Philip teaches that the nourishment should be given to the light in Caravaggio’s life and in our lives,” he said.
— Carol Glatz