A Catholic Prayer App for the 21st Century

A merican Catholics have poured time and treasure into expanding the Church’s reach in the digital age. Call it the Catholic New Media. It comes in plenty of flavors, but there’s a handful of heavy-hitters, including Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Ascension, both of which provide written resources but have also delved into video and podcast creation. Word on Fire, helmed by Bishop Robert Barron, produces an enormous slate of videos and podcasts, many featuring Barron himself, and boasts millions of viewers. At the start of 2021, Ascension launched a new podcast, The Bible in a Year, hosted by Father Mike Schmitz, which has turned out to be hugely successful, topping the Apple podcast charts in the U.S. for months at a time. Next year, the group will launch a second podcast with Father Mike, The Catechism in a Year.

Now, another major player in the Catholic digital world is Hallow: a mobile app designed to help users learn how to pray and incorporate prayer into their daily lives. Founder Alex Jones launched the app nearly four years ago, following his return to the Catholic faith in which he was raised.

“[Hallow] really came out of a pretty personal need,” Jones told me in an interview. “The journey is intertwined with my own faith story.” Jones fell away from the Church in high school and college, despite attending the University of Notre Dame, which has a vibrant and active Catholic community.

“I would’ve considered myself atheist or agnostic most of the time, which unfortunately is not too uncommon of a story,” Jones said. After graduating from Notre Dame, Jones began trying out secular meditation apps modeled after the Eastern tradition, with a particular focus on mindfulness.

“Every time I would meditate with mindfulness meditation, my mind would start to feel pulled toward something spiritual, something Christian, you know, the cross or the Trinity or something like that,” Jones said. “I would’ve considered myself agnostic still, but I started asking everyone I could think of if there was any connection there.”

Jones turned to friends and mentors, looking for answers, including some priests he had known at Notre Dame. “Everyone kind of laughed at me and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been doing it for 2,000 years. It’s called prayer.’”

It was a revolutionary discovery. As Jones came back to his Catholic faith, he found himself contemplating the passage in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus teaches his disciples to pray the Our Father. “‘Hallow’ was the word that stuck out to me from that passage,” he said. “It changed my life. It brought me to tears. It’s the most important part of who I am. It brought me this beautiful combination of this deep sense of peace with this depth of meaning and purpose. Hallow means ‘to make holy.’ I knew I needed to do that for the rest of my life.”

It was this life-changing experience that led to the Hallow app, an effort to attract those seeking mindfulness to the depth of the Catholic spiritual tradition, beginning with core practices of prayer and meditation such as prayer with Scripture, Ignatian spirituality, and the Rosary. At first, Jones was building the app mostly for himself, while hoping others might find value in it, too. “I’ve made a deal with God very early on in this journey that if this worked out, He’d get all the credit,” Jones said. “It’s clear that He’s the one leading this.”

“When there were 1,000 people using it, we were blown away,” he told me. “It was bigger than we ever thought this thing would be.” Hallow has hit 3.7 million app downloads across the world, and just a few weeks ago, it marked 100 million prayers prayed through the app. Much of the app’s content is available for free, but some of its features and more in-depth prayer content is available by subscription, either for $59.99 a year or $8.99 a month.

These days, the app is always expanding. Just recently, the team added a section of prayers led by athletes, including a series about relying on God with NBA player Jrue Holiday, a series on resilience with former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, and pregame prayers with former NFL quarterback Brady Quinn. The app also recently added a section of prayers for families, including a series on preparing for Sunday Mass, and a section of audiobooks, including Introduction to the Devout Life and The Story of a Soul.

Hallow also partners with other Catholic media organizations to offer their content to users. Bishop Barron, for example, produces a series on the Psalms for the app, while Jeff Cavins of Ascension records daily Gospel reflections. Hallow also allows users to stream Father Mike Schmitz’s The Bible in a Year straight from the app.

The creators want to keep developing Hallow to meet the needs of the users praying with it. “We started to see that a lot of folks were using it late at night, so we came out with a sleep section, reading Scripture in a peaceful way,” Jones said. “Then we started to see a lot of folks throughout the day in the sessions using background music. I’m not a big fan of that myself, but people love it, so we added this big music section where we create and produce a bunch of music.”

Jones said the team receives regular notes from users whose lives were changed as a result of the prayer life they formed while using the app. “There was a woman who had been dating someone for many years and who, through using the app, decided she was being called to religious life,” he said. “There was another woman who had lost her only son and who was able to, for the first time, find some sense of hope and peace and ability to carry on.”

The Hallow team has also been working on forming partnerships with schools, including Catholic colleges and universities, to make the app available to students on campus. The most recent addition was Notre Dame, Jones’s alma mater (and my own).

“We were able reach out to them and start a conversation about bringing it to their student body,” Jones said, “for folks who may not take their faith as seriously as the folks in campus ministry, to be able to reach out to them in a way that maybe is a little more accessible to say, ‘Hey, try this app. It’s like meditation, but it’s the Church’s mindfulness and spirituality,’ inviting them to give it a try and to invite them to build that relationship with God.”

“Our goal is to try to help folks bring God into as many aspects of their lives as possible, trying to get to the ‘praying unceasingly’ goal. Whether it’s waking up or going to bed or working or working out or studying, how can we help folks bring God into those experiences as much as possible?”