The Santo Prayer Mission began with two people, one phone, and no intention whatsoever of starting anything.
The problem we were actually solving
It was the pandemic. Our parents and relatives were isolated in Kerala, churches were shut, and the daily Rosary that had held those households together for decades had simply stopped being possible in company.
So my wife Simmy and I recorded one, in Malayalam, at home, and sent it to them. The ambition ended there. It was a solution to a family problem, and we expected it to be obsolete within months.
When strangers started writing
They did not stop at the family. People we had never met found the videos and began writing to say they had prayed along — some of them elderly, many of them in places where a Malayalam Rosary was not otherwise available at any hour they were awake.
We had promoted nothing. We have still promoted nothing. Every share the mission has ever had has come from someone who wanted somebody else to hear it, and I regard that as the single most important fact about it.
Three years, three channels
Between 2020 and 2023 the family prayer expanded across three YouTube channels: more than ten thousand prayer videos, in more than ten languages, past sixty million views and twenty million watch hours, in more than a hundred countries.
I put those numbers down because people ask for them, not because they are the point. The point is that each one of them is a person who prayed.
From a channel to an app
What began as recordings has become Santo — a dedicated Catholic prayer and meditation app, built with Catholic clergy and media partners worldwide to create, license and distribute prayer and inspirational content in over twelve languages.
And alongside it Santo Kids, for the youngest hearts, because the thing I most wanted at seven was for somebody to hand me the faith in a form I could actually hold.
Under whose patronage
None of this was planned by me, and I want to be plain about that rather than modest.
The mission runs under the guidance of the Holy Mother and the special patronage of St. Joseph — a carpenter, which has never once stopped meaning something to a carpenter’s son. My part has been to keep saying yes to the next small obvious thing, and to keep the accounts straight.