Award announced at the 2022 Catholic Media Conference held in Portland, OR
The Catholic Media Association (CMA) has awarded the prestigious Cardinal John P. Foley Award for “demonstrated excellence and innovation in Catholic storytelling” to Fr. Mike Schmitz and Jeff Cavins for their 2021 chart-topping podcast, The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)™ featuring Jeff Cavins.
Announced at the CMA’s Catholic Media Conference in Portland, Oregon earlier this week, the Cardinal John P. Foley Award is part of the annual awards program hosted by the CMA to honor Catholic communications professionals, news publications, journalists, and publishers.
As stated on its website, the CMA was incorporated in 1911 and is “an organization of Catholic publishers and media professionals united in the action of servicing the Catholic Church.”
The CMA website shares that the eponymous Cardinal John P. Foley was:
For decades regarded as the patriarch of the American Catholic press… brought the news of the Catholic Church to the American public, … served as the assistant editor and Vatican correspondent for Philadelphia’s archdiocesan newspaper, … [and] was known to millions throughout the world as the English language narrator on broadcasts of the pope’s midnight Christmas Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.
– Catholic Media Association Website
A Story that Will Echo in Eternity
In nominating Fr. Mike Schmitz and Jeff Cavins for this award, The Bible in a Year podcast publisher Ascension commented that:
No single story has impacted human history more than the Story of Salvation – the story of creation, sin, and redemption as found in the Bible. And yet for many, the millennia that have passed between the writings of Moses and the modern innovations of today render that saving Story to be incomprehensible. The Second Vatican Council invited all Catholics to read the Bible, and yet many still struggle with understanding this ancient text and connecting it to their daily lives.
In 2021, Fr. Mike Schmitz and Jeff Cavins vaulted this hurdle with excellence, captivating hundreds of thousands of listeners with their innovative “The Bible in a Year” podcast – a humble daily offering of the Scriptural text plus encouraging contextual notes. If you ask Fr. Mike and Jeff, they will say that the Holy Spirit deserves all of the credit; it is God’s story, after all. But we humbly submit that God’s story is most powerful when Spirit-filled storytellers bring it to life and tell it anew in their own time and place. […]
In addition to all the earthly successes of this award-winning, chart-topping show, the efforts of these two storytellers will echo in eternity, when members of their audience will add their own chapter to the Story of Salvation: wonderful accounts of how Fr. Mike and Jeff empowered them to find their own place in God’s story of love for His People, and to interpret every event of their lives through the narrative lens of Scripture.
About The Bible in a Year Podcast – 6.8 Billion Total Minutes Listened
The Bible in a Year podcast is the most successful Catholic podcast of all time. After its January 1, 2021 launch, The Bible in a Year became the #1 podcast on the Apple Podcast charts in all categories for 17 days, achieved the same feat for 7 days in January 2022, and remains the #1 podcast on Apple’s Religion & Spirituality chart today.
The Bible in a Year reports 750,000 average daily podcast downloads / video plays in 2022, an increase of 63% over 2021. The show has seen 6.8 Billion total listening minutes and 300 Million all-time downloads.
Bios for Fr. Mike Schmitz and Jeff Cavins
- Bio for Fr. Mike Schmitz – Ascension Newsroom
- Bio for Jeff Cavins – Ascension Newsroom
About Ascension
Ascension is a multimedia network and the leader in Catholic faith formation. Over the past 24 years, Ascension has helped to nurture the faith of over 10 million Catholics through award-winning books, the chart-topping The Bible in a Year podcast, more than 50 unique faith formation programs, and Ascension Presents, which hosts the largest Catholic YouTube channel in English.
Media Contact
For author interviews or other media inquiries, please contact Lauren Joyce at Newsroom@AscensionPress.com.