CV NEWS FEED // When Catholics think about the history and roots of the Faith, they usually think about St. Peter’s Basilica, the Holy Land, Notre Dame, or other ancient churches and communities in Europe.
They definitely don’t think of Wisconsin. Or New Mexico. Or Kentucky, for that matter.
The reality is that Catholics have existed in the U.S. for centuries, but many aren’t aware of the impact that Catholicism has had on the country over the years. However, one podcast is trying to change that.
Tom Crowe and Noëlle Hiester Crowe launched the American Catholic History podcast in 2019 after Tom spent a while doing research for a book called the American Catholic Almanac, co-authored by Emily Stimpson Chapman and CatholicVote President Brian Burch.
“I didn’t know a lot about American Catholic history at the time so I just started doing all kinds of internet searches looking for archbishops, places, events, saints, foundresses, founders, and names that I knew, but those led to other things… all these rabbit holes of the interconnectedness of American Catholic history,” Tom told CatholicVote.
Once the book was published, Tom’s wealth of knowledge about the country’s Catholic history didn’t go away. His wife Noëlle finally told him, “This is a podcast!” American Catholic History was born shortly after.
Each episode, which is roughly 20 to 25 minutes long, focuses on a Catholic place, person, or event in America’s rich history. Tom and Noëlle highlighted that the history shared in their podcast is personal, tangible, and here, not far away or in a different country.
“Catholics were already coast to coast long before the United States was,” Tom told CatholicVote, adding:
When Catholics think about going to places where great Catholic things happened, or think about going to pray at the tomb of a saint or a really holy person, we usually think about crossing the ocean and going to Europe … but the simple fact is here in America we don’t need to do that. … We have them all right here.
The podcast has featured the lives of well-known Catholic saints like St. John Neumann, St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, giving listeners a better idea of the saints’ witness to Catholicism and their impact on American culture and society.
Other episodes focus on figures with lesser-known Catholic backgrounds or ties, such as actors John Wayne and Gary Cooper, Yankees baseball player Roger Maris, and Wild West legend Buffalo Bill Cody.
Through the podcast, Tom and Noëlle also call attention to Catholic locations in the US, like a church in Kentucky that houses the relics of two Roman martyrs. Other featured sites include the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, the location of the only approved Marian apparition in the country; Port Tobacco in Maryland, the site of the first women’s religious community in the U.S.; and the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore, the first cathedral built in America.
In addition to hosting the podcast, Tom and Noëlle also lead American Catholic History pilgrimages to visit Catholic sites around the country. They brought a group to Kentucky in 2021 and again in 2023, and they visited Santa Fe in 2022. They also made a pilgrimage to Maryland and Virginia in 2022 in conjunction with the National Conference for Single Catholics. They hope to do a pilgrimage to Wisconsin as well.
“We like to combine [the pilgrimages] with what is local,” Noëlle said, “so in Kentucky we also do bourbon tours… things like that. We want to give people a taste of local flavor.”
Tom added that visiting local culture on the pilgrimages provides a better understanding of what it means to be Catholic.
“The idea is that Catholics aren’t just people in churches—we’re people in the world who make a difference in the world and do things in the world,” he said. “In Kentucky, some of the earliest bourbon makers were Catholics, so we go to these distilleries to get a sense of ‘In what ways did the Catholics have an impact on this local area?’”
“There are impressive and incredible Catholic stories coast to coast,” Tom said.
Since the podcast’s launch five years ago, Tom and Noëlle have recorded almost 200 episodes. A few times, they have made it into the top 200 on Apple podcasts in the history category. They regularly receive 6,000 downloads on every episode, which Tom says is something that only 10% of podcasts achieve.
Several episodes from 2024 and two from 2023 can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. All other episodes from 2023 and earlier are no longer available, but Tom and Noëlle say that they’re working on re-recording or uploading them again soon.
Disclosure: the writer has familial connections to Tom and Noëlle.
