John Donahue
I’m the youngest of 4, I grew up in a devout Catholic household, and I was homeschooled. Being Catholic was our family’s “thing”. For vacation every year, we wouldn’t go to the mountains, we would literally go to a Catholic family camp in Ohio called the Apostolate for Family Consecration. That camp became my favorite place in the whole world and it ingrained in my head a message that so many young Catholics don’t have the luxury of receiving: Being Catholic is fun, joyful, adventurous, meaningful, relevant, etc.
At the age of eight, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker. Because I was homeschooled and would finish my school work by like 10 am, I would watch filmmaking courses on YouTube the rest of the day. I did that from age eight until age eighteen. When I graduated high school, I began working in the film industry right away. I did a lot of freelance film gigs for commercials and movies and I began working as the Communications guy at my parish, part-time. One day while I was working an 18-hour day on set for an insurance commercial, there was a Ouija board on set. Although that might not seem like a big deal, at the end of an 18-hour day where I had put my blood, sweat, and tears into working on this dumb commercial, I realized that giving my time and talent to the secular film industry was not what I wanted. I went full-time at my parish and stopped taking secular freelance gigs. I became a Youth Ministry Coordinator in addition to Communications. During my time at the parish, I witnessed a sad reality: Hundreds of teens going through Confirmation prep but none of them experiencing anything of the Catholic Church beyond that. Not even Sunday Mass. Their only view of being Catholic is “On Wednesdays after I’ve just sat in a classroom at school under fluorescent lights for eight hours, I come to church, where I sit in a classroom under fluorescent lights for an additional two hours.”
My heart couldn’t keep it in anymore. I needed to share the vibrant Catholic experience with them. I quit my job at the parish, started taking Catholic freelance gigs to pay the bills, and started Truth Charting. Its mission is to show young people that being Catholic is not boring.