The Catholic Angle

When I conceived the idea for a newsletter for stay-at-home-moms, I wasn't thinking of making it religion-specific. I wanted to have as large an audience as possible, and since my premise is that SAHMs are a relatively small number to try and reach, I didn't want to shoot myself in the foot by shrinking my audience even further. "After all," I reasoned. "If I can't find enough SAHMs to make friends with, there can't be THAT many out there" (Actually, if I were really honest with myself, I would admit that I don't need to know twenty SAHMs to fill my social calendar--I know only 3, and that seems to be enough for me. However, it does seem strange that we don't really connect the way I assumed SAHMs would. Is it time, or different values? More on this later). The newsletter would also involve the collaborative services of a friend from college (and SAHM) who happens to be an editorial genius, and who also happens to be religious, but not Catholic.

However, when I found out about the excellent services available on Blogger.com, there seemed to be no obstacle to creating a personal blog for my own writing that either doesn't find its way into the newsletter, or needs an airing before we spend bucks to print it. Why didn't we conceive the idea as a web-based publication? Well, because:

1. I am intimidated by all the technogeek stuff involved
2. It would be problematic (but not impossible) to find a server home for our creation, as well as more expensive
3. I felt I would be giving up too much control over my "baby" if I had to farm out too many services beyond the two-person partnership that was developing
4. Publicizing and distributing a paper newsletter has a certain appeal when you're not sure how many readers you're going to have--if the newsletter is in their hands, reading it is instant gratification, unlike trying to get someone to go online and find and navigate your web site, and never really knowing your readership
5. It is more intuitive to charge for a subscription to a paper publication (since people have the product in their hands) than to a web-based one which may involve electronic payment methods and other technogeek gobbledygook stuff that would probably cost more money but, since web-based publishing appears to be cheaper, we wouldn't be able to charge as much (to say nothing of the fact that I have never paid money to subscribe to any service available on the Web, many services being available for free).

This brings me back to the Catholic angle. When I was dreamily saying to myself, "There should be a newsletter for stay-at-home-moms, just like the Tightwad Gazette," I immediately thought of The Catholic Housewife as a title, and immediately dismissed it. As much as I feel it fits my perspective the best, I felt the word Catholic would alienate way more people than the word Tightwad. And the word Housewife doesn't cover the SAHM angle. But since this blog is a personal venture, I feel the title carries some advantages in the online world.

There seems to be no shortage of faithful Catholics wandering the Web looking for stuff they can relate to. And since none of it seems housewife-specific, I may be filling a small, but important, niche. In fact, it may be easier to find Catholic housewives on the Web than in my parish. And, if it seems that SAHMs in general are underserved, how much more underserved are Catholic SAHMs? Oh, I know there are many wonderful "family" web sites out there for Catholics. I'm sure in time I'll come to visit them and mention them here. But I'm betting they don't contain the internal perspective of the actual women around whom these families turn.

In conclusion, it simply dawned on me that I would never be able to share my faith, as a Catholic, in the newsletter. Am I talking about hard-hitting apologetics or evangelization? No, unfortunately I don't have the time or the resources to aim so high, and there are already excellent blogs and web sites out there covering this (like Catholic.com and jimmyakin.org). No, I'm talking about housewife stuff, like how cleaning cloth diapers can be kind of like working out your purgatory in this life. I guarantee you won't find insights like that anywhere else!