The Catholic Church has always been at the forefront of the arts. For centuries it commissioned the music, funded the painters, and gave artists both a patron and a purpose. That tradition never disappeared, but somewhere along the way the infrastructure that supported it did. Over the past two decades that began to change. Catholics embraced the tools of the digital age and answered a call to bring the ideas, beauty, and excellence of the faith into the world through new forms. A handful of those efforts broke through and reached the wider culture. Most got lost in the noise, never found their audience, and lacked the resources to continue.


Will Hickl was one of those Catholics who stepped up to create. A musician and founder of the Catholic record label NOVUM RECORDS, he ran into the same walls that stop most Catholic creators short of their potential. Secular platforms were not built for this work. They offer no way to surface it, no fair compensation for the people making it, and no community around it. Working with artists at the label made that picture harder to look away from. It was through that work that Will began collaborating with Peter Buonincontro, a product designer and brand builder who had grown convinced through his own career that the way the secular world approached the arts was fundamentally at odds with the Catholic understanding of creativity as something ordered toward truth and beauty. They were looking at the same problem from different sides. If the Church was going to reclaim its place at the forefront of the arts, Catholic creativity needed a platform built on its own values, one not pulled in the direction of the broader entertainment industry and its incentives. Together they set out to build it.