UPDATE: What to Expect Moving Forward

The Popeular History Podcast

Hey everyone,

Welcome back! First, thank you all for the 417 downloads in the month of November. Not bad, considering my complete absence!
Now, as much as I like reassuring folks that I haven't died, I do hate cluttering my feed with episodes whose purpose is mainly to apologize for delay, so I’ve decided not to do that. I'd rather just focus on all the Catholic history this show is here for. Plus, I went on official hiatus in order to not stress out about scheduling and deadlines, so my revised plan for this hiatus is instead of giving a firm something-every-month commitment, I'm going to just do my best with a monthly target as a loose framework.

Feel free to reach out to me at [e-mail] or whatever social if you ever do want to check in–I absolutely love hearing from listeners! If I do actually die, my obituary will be published in the Newark Advocate and I've made arrangements to have it read on this feed, that way you're not left hanging. This pod will not fade, one way or another we will have an official final episode.

But that's not expected for many decades, as I'm in my mid-30s, and I'm obviously obsessed with history through Pope-colored glasses, and as we have seen I'm not going to be running out of material anytime soon. In fact, the biggest issue at the moment is *too much* material. And really, I've done the podcaster equivalent of having too many tabs open at once.

Let's do a quick roundup of what all I've got going on, and how we're going to do this transition from a daily show to monthly-ish.

First up, my next episode will be a handy romp through well over 100 of your favorite administrative terms from all over the org chart of the Catholic Church, especially the Roman Catholic Church. That sort of glossary is going to be helpful background for Cardinal Numbers moving forward, as I know the terms come hot and heavy there.

We're doing that as our next step because as I've mentioned I'd like to cover all the current Cardinal-Electors before the next conclave. I wish him well and don't think his latest bout of illness is anything catastrophic, but no one is expecting Francis to be Pope 20 years from now, least of all himself, and if I don't prioritize Cardinal Numbers it could easily take that long to get there.

So, Cardinal Numbers first, and I've actually got a fresh batch of 12 episodes of that written. Electors are always aging out, and of course Pope Francis could always add more, but roughly seven more batches of 12 should get us there. If we aim to do a nice round of Cardinal Numbers every other month, we'll get there in early 2025.

Of course if we're aiming for Cardinal Numbers every other month and content every month, that leaves us a space every other, uh, other month for stuff that *isn't* Cardinal Numbers.

And like I mentioned, we've got a lot of open projects to choose from. The most awkwardly dangling is our big timeline of the administrative history of the Catholic Church, with poor Deacon Philip left hanging once again. I've already got the rest of his episodes written, actually they're even recorded and maybe even edited, so we'll do those, and then we'll let that big project sit for a while while we tie up other loose ends. Remember, the plan with that project–Project VERITAS if you're looking it up on Popeularhistory.com–is to cover the whole administrative history of the Catholic Church from start to finish in moderate detail, plus going into more thorough detail on all the Cardinals so we've got more Cardinal Numbers coming up when we get our first named Cardinal in 112AD. So obviously, though I'm going to be backburnering Project Veritas for a few years once we have Deacon Philip settled, don't worry, that'll be the main show in due course.

Of course, there's also classic Popeular History, now the Solemn High Pod, where we've been building Pope Colored glasses for years now. I'm on family leave here, so I'm not going to commit back to a new episode of that every solemnity, but it'll be the principal every-other-month partner for Cardinal Numbers until our rosary themed tour of the New Testament is done and we can call it a wrap on the overall Catholic Worldbuilding series. Then, we'll have some summarizing and reflecting to do–believe it or not, that's going to be fitting in well with the Encyclopedia Catholica concept I announced right before hiatus so that's where Encyclopedia Catholica will be fitting if if you were wondering about that. After that, believe it or not, yes, there will still be the main show that those worldbuilding episodes were building up to, an 87 episode walk through the history of the Papacy itself. And knowing me, probably all of of those 87 episodes will be multiparters. We'll be weaving that into the long-term schedule along with project VERITAS and Cardinal Numbers, not to mention other things like interviews and Habemus Pointsam and I guess my solemnity specials being slotted in. And whatever else popes up along the way. We've got decades of beefy content to go here, there's a reason the last planned episode is my obituary.

So, let's get to it. I'll be posting the Holy Org Chart with all those definitions I mentioned once enough time has passed that I'm confident these will show up in the right order in the feed.

Thank you for listening, God bless you all!