Alessandro DiSanto on the mission of CatholicTech

“I’m excited for CatholicTech to lead the charge in our postmodern world with an authentically Catholic pursuit of truth.”

Alessandro DiSanto, co-founder of the Hallow App, gives insight to the forming of his company, and his excitement about the mission of CatholicTech.

What inspired you to develop the Hallow App, and how has its growth impacted you? Are there any saints that have inspired you along the way? 
The founding team of Hallow started as a group of friends from college searching for answers to a few big questions. Catching up on the weekends, we realized that we were struggling with two main issues: I was really stressed working in finance looking for ways to find a little more peace in a crazy busy world; others were wondering if even God exists at all, and He does, how to get to know Him. We all eventually circled around prayer, especially meditative prayer, as a way both to come to know God and to find peace in a personal relationship with Him. In learning about the many meditative and contemplative traditions of the faith, we discerned a call to go out and help the rest of the world learn to pray as well. 

While St. Thomas Aquinas is definitely an inspiration for me, and I took his name during my Confirmation, and St. Teresa of Avila is the patroness of Hallow. Growing in the meditative approach to prayer is at the heart of what we do and we’ve grown to understand and appreciate the mystical charism of the faith through her works.

The Hallow App has recently started a program for university partnerships – what kind of fruits or growth have you seen from these collaborations so far? 
In the last two years, we’ve started working with Franciscan, Notre Dame, and a few other Catholic colleges, and it has been awesome to play a small role in the spiritual formation of college students across the country. There are obviously already many amazing resources on these campuses that aid in spiritual development. Hallow aims to be a resource specifically for the development of the daily habits of a spiritual life. Our goal is to help students build a rhythm of prayer in the context of student life with a tool that can follow them into adulthood. The challenge is that when you are a college student you’re in the bubble of your university; you create structures in your life and you develop great devotions in that context, but then you’re often thrown into a completely different environment after graduation and you struggle to maintain your spiritual life amidst all the change. 

Our hope is to help people learn different ways of praying, different charisms, and different spiritualities, and then to help them continue those practices throughout the rest of their life. No one needs an app to pray and the pinnacle of your prayer life will never be on Hallow – that’s at the altar – but hopefully Hallow can be useful in providing support, structure, and guidance in your spiritual life – while still always being oriented toward participation in the sacraments. 

There was a recent conference at the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences on ethical solutions for human flourishing that you participated in. What do you think is preventing human flourishing in our world today, and how do you think the mission of CatholicTech is addressing that? 
Technology is extremely powerful and can be extremely useful in many different ways. Where we can start to go astray is when we focus all of our efforts on the goal of efficiency, without first discerning orientation. Ultimately, we are stewards of all the blessings that we have been given. We are called to be good stewards of our time, resources, and relationships, so saving time and effort through the application of technology can be good things, but if we focus on efficiency for efficiency’s sake or on using that saved time on entertainment for our own self-aggrandizement, we lose sight of the bigger picture. We are not simply called to our own goals and priorities in life, but rather we are called to fulfill God’s call for our lives. If we let the “what” come before the “why,” we naturally start to fashion ourselves into our own God. More often than not, it is not technology in and of itself that hurts us, but more our unintentional use of technology without having first discerned a specific end toward which to orient.

I think that CatholicTech’s mission is going to help lead people to the virtuous pursuit of truth by teaching students how to ask the right questions of the technology in our lives and how to put God’s calling first. 

What impact do you think CatholicTech can have on the world at large? 
In today’s world, society has misunderstood part of the Church’s mission in its pursuit of truth — truth being that which exists, as Aquinas tells us. In all existence, physical and spiritual, created beings bear the mark of their creator. By studying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, we come to know something of Michelangelo, the artist of the frescos. Similarly, in the search for any physical truth, we discover some element of the nature of God, creator of the universe. The great hope of CatholicTech is that we can reclaim that part of the tradition where the Church is at the forefront, where it has been for most of human history, of pursuing all elements of truth, but especially the physical truths of the Universe – all of which point toward God. 

CatholicTech opens the invitation to come to know God through science to those who have been confused by the perceived conflict between faith and science. God willing, this will be the inspiration for them to rediscover their faith, or to discover it for the first time. In the context of an increasingly secularized, polarized society trying to ask those big questions of who we are and what our purpose in life is, it is increasingly important to extend the invitation of faith in a way that meets people where they are at, and to help them search for the answers in Christ. I’m excited for CatholicTech to lead that charge in our postmodern world with an authentically Catholic pursuit of truth.

Alessandro DiSanto is the co-founder of Hallow – a Catholic app made to help with meditation and prayer. An alumnus of Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, DiSanto is a member of the Board of Trustees at Catholic Institute of Technology.