Today, I’m sharing one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made: the Catholic Feminist’s season 4 finale episode in November will be its last.
Tune in to hear why. It’s not because I didn’t have time, it’s not because I didn’t have ideas, it’s not because I’m bored of it: it’s because I feel like God wants me to take a step back, focus on my family, evangelize through my fiction, and do more long form writing. And I’m doing what HE asks me to, every single time.
I hope you understand. I hope you’re not mad at me. I hope you’re proud of me. And I hope you know how thankful I am for you.
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I had many people request to read the email that was sent to email subscribers. Usually I keep our emails exclusive to subscribers, but this one seems especially important, so I’ve pasted it below.
I have a big announcement. It’s going to make some of you sad.
The season 4 finale will be the end of the Catholic Feminist Podcast. After four years, I’m hanging up my microphone.
It’s important to me to explain the why behind this decision, because I know people have questions, and this is not as simple as “I don’t have time!” or “It’s too expensive!”, neither of which are actually true. In fact, the Catholic Feminist makes me money through advertisers and social media partnerships, so I will be taking a major financial hit by ending it. And I believe you make time for the things you want to make time for; “I don’t have time” feels like a fallacy.
I am quite scared to do this, if I can be brutally honest. I am scared for my bank account and my career, and that old but-I’m-abandoning-my-mission feeling that snuck in after I left FOCUS is trying to rear its ugly head. I’m scared that people will be mad at me, and my heart’s pretty fragile right now.
If I were to grow the Catholic Feminist, or even sustain it at its current infrastructure, it would require me to do things I don’t believe I’m being called to do. It would be quite easy for me, at this point, to become a Professional Catholic: a speaker at conferences, on this plane or that, taking selfies and advertising my own thoughts. I could drop some dollar bills on fancy branding. I could start a mini-series, a YouTube channel, a book club, a membership site. I could start a Patreon! I could launch a conference! I could run a more debate-styled show! I have no shortage of ideas and plenty of work ethic.
And yet, none of those feels like the right thing to do. Not in the slightest.
I hear the desires of Jesus, clear as a bell, telling me that it’s time to shut the microphone off and step back. I get a literal stomachache when I think of doing these things and, as I read in a book recently, the body keeps the score. The female’s body knows when something just…ain’t right. St. John Paul the Great said that intuition was one of a woman’s greatest gifts. I’d like to embrace that intuition.
Furthermore, the Catholic Feminist is at times preventing me from being the Catholic feminist I would like to be. Instead of being able to learn and morph and change opinions, I’m under a spotlight of my own making. I would like to educate myself without strangers on the internet telling me to “educate myself”, if that makes sense, and I would like to explore my own thoughts in a more long-form way without slapping an Instagram filter on them. I am tired of short-term content. And I feel strongly that Jesus, instead of asking me to pick up a cross and continue on, is giving me a different cross: one that looks like stepping back and resting a bit from this form of professional ministry, which I’ve engaged in for four years. One that looks like FOMO—knowing I could do a great job at this, if I kept going, and knowing that instead, others will. And knowing that’s ok.
Four years ago, when I started the show, I’d guess there were maybe 3-4 podcasts for Catholic women specifically. Now? There are at least 30 or so, likely many more. It’s a different space. It’s one that will be fine.
Lastly, the way many Catholics are engaging in discourse right now is a way that I don’t believe is pointing us towards truth. I think some tricky things, and I’m still figuring them out in my head and with my God. I’m not ready to burst forth with them, and yet, I can’t contribute well in this form of justice discourse at the moment because I feel like so much of it is going in the wrong direction and I feel, like, kindergarten-level when it comes to the new schools of thought I’ve been learning. It’s left me in an uncomfortable position: one where people are looking to me for answers that I don’t think they’re gonna like. And I need them to look somewhere else: to Heaven. There is a sense of demand in having a large platform, and some of it may be justified: that you “owe” something to people who have given time to following you, and that you need to word things in a certain way, and that you need to express things quickly…all kinds of group-think that is just very, very unappealing to me, nor Godly, in my understanding of Him. I want to explore that in a different format than the Catholic Feminist Podcast, which has so many fans that expect a certain thing. They expect it with love and kindness and enthusiasm and joy, but they expect it nonetheless.
I started this show because it was the best way I could live the truth of the gospel and start a new conversation. That conversation is happening. Sometimes, it’s happening in a way I don’t think is good, and I’m getting yanked into it, and I don’t like that. It doesn’t feel real or true. (Am I making sense? Am I rambling? I’m crying in a Starbucks.)
And so, there’s time for a choice: the bus is here, waiting for me to get on. It’s waiting to drive off to Catholic Celebrity Land, a place where I live out my days preaching the Gospel as a profession. A place where some people, surely, are called. A place I could almost certainly thrive in and make a living in. But I am saying, for now, “no, thank you.” I am looking at hopes I had for a long time and putting them to bed, knowing they aren’t going to happen. I am choosing, for now, a different road. And I’m watching that bus close its doors and drive away.
The Catholic Feminist Podcast was created to inspire you to actually do something: in your local community, in your family, among your real-life friends. It’s time, now, for you to do those things. You can change the world without being on social media and having the perfect post about the latest abortion law or immigration policy or public health crisis. You can change the world by thinking differently and being relational. You can change the world on your own porch more than you can change the world on a podcast. I promise.
I have always hoped to lead by example. Here am I: hearing a call, following. Hearing that call change, and accepting it with open arms.
If I know nothing else in life it’s that radical trust in Jesus has never failed me, and it won’t start to now. I am trusting he’s got some kind of wild plan for me, or perhaps, the wildest thing of all: that I am just not as seen. I am not having a crisis of faith: I am as Catholic as I’ve ever been, and I feel the gospel beating through my veins. I feel closer to Jesus and His good, good church right now than ever before, in many ways.
You can do it, sister: that impossible thing of viewing people as image bearers of God. I will not call you to less than that near-impossible task, only made possible with the blood of Jesus. I would never do that to you. I am with you in this, even without my voice in your headphones. We are all connected in the Eucharist, that source and summit of our faith, and that means we’ll never be far apart.
This, my sweet sisters, is not the end. It’s a beginning. The Catholic Feminist is not me, a person: it is us, a Church. We have changed the way the church talks about feminism. Not me: us. The women I interviewed and the women who listened.
Tomorrow, I’m going to send out a second email, detailing what the Catholic Feminist willlook like over the next year, and tomorrow’s episode will be all about this decision. Know that the Catholic Feminist as a “brand” isn’t going away, it’s simply changing and taking a giant step back.
It has been the honor of a lifetime. Peace be with you.
In Him, through Her,
Claire Swinarski
