MET-AJ-1-NUNS-BUSThe following press release came to Cal Catholic during Holy Week.

Los Angeles/San Diego CA—-A new kind of Jesus radio network, CELEBRATE RADIO, combining the best of both Catholic and Protestant teaching, personalities and pop music and much about ways to help ‘the least of these’ and ‘love thy neighbor’ is crowd funding for a late Spring or early Summer launch. The network will be available 24/7 to everyone on the web and with smart phone apps and a few months later to 7 million more people on the Galaxy 19 satellite across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Central America,part of South America and eastern Australia. Later, Celebrate Radio will air on a second satellite, Hotbird 6 to Europe and the Middle East.

The 24/7 network is largely programmed already. Technical work is being headed by European Gospel Radio, founded by a Franciscan and uploading to satellite by the Israeli company RR Sat. The North American satellite feed will be a channel on Christian Glorystar.

The network is based on a 7-year old weekly music and interview show called ‘Reaching Up’ which has won Christian awards, has listeners who rave about its ‘information, uplifting spirituality and music’ and who have asked for it to become full-time 24/7. The network is looking to crowd funding, just begun, to raise $6,500, then another $9,000 in small and bigger donations to start and pay for a full first year of operation, until it is sustained by sponsors and underwriters. There are no salaries.

Listeners on the network, that describes itself as ‘positively positive’ will hear people as diverse as Pope Francis, pastors Rick and Kay Warren, Nuns on the Bus, Max Lucado and the voices of people like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman John Lewis. But it will exclude no one and have no political agenda, gossip, talking heads or sensationalism.

Celebrate Radio will also feature its own playlist of 2000 contemporary songs, from Catholic group KatholIcus to Christian stars Newsboys and Mercy Me to the singing sensations from Northern Ireland, The Priests.

There will be Catholic music programs like Catholic Music Express and Protestant-oriented Under the Radar and in between, its own created psas to ‘Be a Blessing to Others’ and its own major in-person interviews ranging from Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox to the Franciscan Pro-Unione leaders near the Vatican. And much about how to help others and be real ‘salt and light.’

Says co-founder Don Fass, a veteran broadcaster, ‘we need media to bring us together, we need radio that opens minds and hearts as Pope Francis talks about and we need to unite to solve society’s problems. Media, which has been way too divisive, can be a big part of that.’

Other in-person guests include Vicar Nicky Gumbel who heads the Alpha Course, Compassion International CEO-Emeritus Dr. Wess Stafford, U.S. UNICEF CEO Caryl Stern, African Childrens Choir, civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, The Newsboys, Saddleback’s Rick and Kay Warren, Father Malcolm Boyd, Mercy Me, Newsboys, Israeli stars Rami Kleinstein and Idan Raichel and nearly 100 others.