James Duffy is the president and founder of Avila Radio and the author of the new book, The Mission of Catholic Radio.

Formerly with EWTN as international radio marketing manager, he has spent 11 years working for various Catholic apostolates and nonprofits. Duffy spoke from Georgia with Register features correspondent Tim Drake.

Where are you from originally?

I grew up in Indiana in a small town north of Indianapolis. I'm the oldest of five children. I have three brothers and a sister. I went to a Catholic grade school and to a public high school. My father worked for General Motors and my mother was a homemaker and made the home very well. It was a great upbringing.

Have you always been Catholic?

Yes; the area where I grew up was only about 2% Catholic. In high school I got involved with a bunch of evangelical friends and participated in Bible studies with them, but I never left the faith. I was always a server at weekday Masses. It kept me on the straight and narrow. I attended college in Spain and studied in Ireland and Italy. During that time I did Catholic missionary work.

You've spent 11 years working with various Catholic apostolates. What specifically led to your work in radio?

After college, when I was in Italy, I would go to Bologna and while there I did a multilingual rosary for Radio Maria. It was interesting because people would come up to me on the street and they would say, “You were the American guy doing the rosary on the radio.” This excited me for the possibility of radio. It opened my eyes to how many people listen to radio and the fact that the faith could be increased through it.

When I was working with Youth and Family Encounter I prayed a lot about my career. I debated between wanting to go into something where I could make money or continuing working full time for the Church. I decided that I wanted to keep working for the Church, but I wanted to be effective. So, media seemed like the most effective way to spread God's word. At the time I met Dave Targonski at EWTN and he said they were looking for someone in radio. One thing led to another and I ended up being hired. That providentially led me to Birmingham. I really enjoyed working with EWTN. Everyone is focused on the spread of the Word and also on producing high-quality material.

From all those years working for the Church you must have some good stories to tell.

I remember on a trip to Poland once the culture shock finally hit me. We went to dinner with a priest at his parish and he brought out three-dayold milk that had come straight from a cow and had been sitting on a shelf. It was slimy. He said it was a delicacy in Poland and that very few Americans probably had this. So we had to choke that down—a sort of half-baked, room-temperature cottage cheese.

I always enjoyed working with the youth. Sometimes I would work with kids that were headed in the wrong direction. There was one teen from Canada that I recall. After a weekend retreat he was so moved that he entered the seminary. It's powerful what God can do even through young people. It's sometimes easier to see God working through young people because they are more open and they take on ideals.

How many Catholic radio stations are there across the United States?

There are about 42 full-time Catholic radio stations and about 65 others that have some Catholic programming, sometimes an hour or two a week. They are very spread out. The biggest concentration is in Wisconsin and Michigan. About half of the 42 are EWTN affiliates.

How did you decide to begin Avila Radio?

When I was with EWTN I discovered that there were about 160 groups in the United States that wanted to start radio stations. During my time with EWTN, we were able to help seven get started. The problem is distribution.

We need a group dedicated to training people in how to get stations up and running. That was my whole purpose in starting Avila Radio in early 2001. We are currently working with groups in Atlanta and Denver. In the next few months we hope to pick up about four more. We work with lay groups or dioceses and train them to manage the campaigns. We provide a 130-page manual, marketing, training materials and infrastructure so that they can create independently owned Catholic radio stations.

In some ways it seems as if Catholic radio lags behind Protestant radio. Why do you think that is?

There are 1,200 full-scale Protestant radio stations in the U.S. If you include the low-power stations it's 1,500. One of the things I've noticed in this work is that Catholics sometimes have a hard time pulling together with one vision and one mind. Protestant evangelicals seem to be very good at that. Therefore they tended to pull together in larger groups and got a jump-start. Catholics are the single-largest denomination in the U.S., so the potential for Catholic radio is huge. Our goal is to have helped bring on 200 more Catholic radio stations in the next 10 to 15 years. We are seeing good fruits in the effort so far. I think we can do it.

What are the key steps to starting a Catholic radio station?

First, we always say if you want to start a Catholic radio station you should call us, because we can take a lot of the headache out of it. What we do is train in fund raising, publicity and organization and also in getting the blessing from the local bishop. We don't work anywhere unless we have the bishop's blessing.

We also have available our book, The Mission of Catholic Radio. It comes with a 70-minute audio CD that has three founders of Catholic radio stations speaking about the virtues of founding a station. It's a great motivation for anyone interested in starting Catholic radio or for any Catholic apostolate.

What kind of fruits have you seen born from the work of Catholic radio stations?

One station in Midland, Texas, recently had two Protestant ministers convert to the Catholic faith in part because of listening to a station there. They started listening out of curiosity, but eventually got hooked and said, “This makes sense, where can I get more information?” The station linked them up with a local RCIA program.

There is also a story of a woman in Buffalo, N.Y. She was in the process of becoming an evangelical and was praying, in her car, that God would relieve her of her Catholic “baggage.” As she was pulling out of a parking lot she almost hit another car that had a bumper sticker for a local Catholic radio station. She figured that listening to the station would help her in her decision. After listening to it for three hours she had most of her questions answered and made the decision to remain Catholic. Hearing the good that Catholic radio stations do keeps me going. Catholic radio is exciting. There is increased interest weekly. I love it.