About

When I entered the seminary, I had a desire to reduce my technology usage since it was really becoming a problem towards the end of my time in undergrad. I had a desire to disconnect, but I still wanted a place where others could keep up with what I was doing. After all, I didn't want to post my actual life on social media in order to cater to my diverse set of followers. That is where this blog / website comes in.

When I arrived at the seminary in 2023, I had almost no habit of spiritual reading. All that I had, at that point, was a journal where I would write down my thoughts as a simple strategy to survive a holy hour. Since then, I have read dozens of spiritual works which have radically changed how I view the world and approach my own holiness. The tradition of the Church came alive in both my heart and intellect. Ever since, I have been trying to learn all of the important things that I wish I was taught in my catechesis.

I didn't have a plan for this website when I began my first weebly page, but it has turned into something more profound than I anticipated. Now, you may explore many of my deepest thoughts that I ponder either in the chapel, in the classroom, or maybe even in the shower. While part of my intention of this blog is to simply share my intellectual and spiritual journey, I occasionally will share lessons that I wished I had learned years ago.

For now, I have named this blog: Ad Altare Dei. It is Latin for "To the Altar of God." It has a twofold meaning. For one, I am in formation for the Roman Catholic priesthood, so I always have the altar of God as my focus. However, you will also quickly learn that my spiritual journey is rooted in living a life of sacrifice for God in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This is the primary duty of the Christian according to Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei. This is also the acceptable sacrifice prophesied by the prophet Malachi:

For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts (Malachi 1:11).

I hope that you can take away something fruitful from my writing. I wouldn't be continuing to post if I didn't have others encouraging me to keep going. As I begin preaching more often and giving lectures, this website will be a place where I upload them for public viewing. I haven't turned on search engine results for this site. This way, it can only grow by word of mouth.

I don't ever plan on making paid / tier subscriptions. The only reason that subscriptions are enabled is for the email notifications that push whenever I publish a new post. That was a feature that the free version of weebly was lacking.

A note about the developer:
This website was created and is currently maintained primarily by Matthew Ayers. Matthew has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University. After college, he spent 2.5 years as a FOCUS missionary and now works as a founding software engineering for Truthly. He also has a side hustle of maintaining websites for a variety of clients.

Thanks to his web development experience, he has kindly taken on hosting and maintaining this website at no cost. I get to contribute to the design and play around with the code, but Matthew is really the brains behind it all. Without him, this iteration of my website wouldn’t have happened.

Please keep Matthew in your prayers as he continues to help build the Church's presence in the digital world.