There is so much content pumped into social media every day that it can be totally overwhelming. The volume is high, the q St. Mary Video PodcastVideo of Fr. Richard Heilman's Sunday homily is podcast each week along with an audio-only version. uality not so much. One way to share a message without the clutter of competition is using a podcast and syndicating it. That's what we recently set up for one of our pro bono clients, St. Mary of Pine Bluff Catholic Church.

St. Mary is served by two excellent priests, Fr. Richard Heilman and Fr. John Zuhlsdorf. The church has Masses in the "ordinary form" (Novus Ordo) and the Traditional Latin Mass. Each week they have two great homilies that deserve a wider audience. So we set up a podcast housed on the St. Mary web site (also created by JComm). 

Getting from homily to delivery involves a number of steps. The Masses each weekend are live-streamed on Facebook and on the parish web site. Each Mass is recorded in high-definition video, so we start with an MP4 video file and edit it down to contain just the sermon. Using Apple's QuickTime software, we export the audio to an M4a file (Apple's version of the MP3).

The St. Mary web site is published on the WordPress platform and happens to have a content plug-in specifically for podcasting. It was as simple as uploading the audio file to the web site server and the video file to YouTube. The Church Content plug-in pushes the content out in a syndicated feed. We registered the blog at Apple Podcasts and Google Play, so anyone can subscribe to the feeds for free.

This system puts the video and audio sermons out in a bunch of places, so they will reach many more people each week than those seated in the pews.