CASSELTON, N.D. — Though not provable, it also would be hard to argue that the Real Presence Radio (RPR) Network success story doesn’t include some elements of divine intervention.
In the course of 15 years, the network birthed 27 signals across a region encompassing the Dakotas, and parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Wyoming, amid the most unlikely of circumstances.
Now, as the network prepares to celebrate 20 years of “sharing the truth in love,” its origin stories are emerging, including the highs and lows of an endeavor that transcended the odds.
Steve Loegering, owner of a machinery manufacturing company, carries the inception seed.
It was Reformation Sunday, and the Christian radio station he was listening to had made some challenging, and rather pointed, remarks about the Catholic faith he holds dear.
“I started talking to the radio, asking, ‘Where’s the Catholic Church in all of this?’” he recounted. “Why aren’t we out there?”
After taking a long breath, he heard the words: “What are you going to do about it?”
Loegering sat with that burning question for about a year, eventually meeting with a few others, John Kerian and Paul MacLeod, who shared his yearning.
“We incorporated in December of 1999,” he said, airing limited programming on AM stations in Mayville and Jamestown. “We got some support, but mostly hate mail,” Loegering added. “After a year of that, I said, ‘I can’t do this.’”
Just as they were about to surrender, the men learned the University of North Dakota was selling its AM station. They put in a blind bid, which was accepted. The kicker? “We had to move the tower,” he said.
When they turned on the signal, “the first thing on the air was the Mass being played,” Loegering said.
Back then, they were operating the station from a closet in the basement of the UND Newman Center. Calling it Ave Maria Radio, they changed the name in 2000 to Real Presence Radio after discovering another station with the original title.
“We’ve had our ups and downs, and a lot of challenges,” Loegering said, “but we truly believed it was an apostolate, and if God wanted it to be in existence, he would allow us to struggle, but also give us a way forward.”
Loegering came up with the phrase that many, even if not avid listeners, have likely seen on yellow and black billboards and bumper stickers: “Catholics Believe What?”
“I really pushed for that,” Loegering said, noting that the aim has always been to educate fellow Catholics about what their faith really teaches. “We’re not trying to be a stealth Catholic organization,” he added. “We just want to share the joys of these truths.”
Gaining momentum
Though incorporated since 1999, the station officially launched on Nov. 6, 2004. And in March 2007, the board hired Steve Splonskowski as executive director, putting him in charge of all the operations: engineering, marketing and finance.
“I had no experience with radio,” Splonskowski admitted, but he’d worked with his father in electronics growing up, and when the two figured out how to fix the broken transmitter, he felt God’s nudge of approval.
From there, he began lining up others to help, including an engineer, accountant and salesperson. In 2010, their part-time fundraiser, Janelle Shanilec, went full time, going gangbusters to help grow the station.
“She’s a pro at it,” Splonskowski said, adding that hiring longtime radio engineer, Brad Wilson, also gave them a needed kickstart in getting the station in Moorhead going, prompting a surge in growth.
“From 2011 to 2012, we added three stations out west — Bismarck, Dickinson and Williston — all in one shot,” he said. “I finally realized, ‘I don’t have to do it all. I just have to be available, and the Lord will do the rest.’”
Even when people thought they were crazy, he said, the resources — and “sometimes a shoulder to cry on” — came through precisely when needed.
An FM station emerges
In the early 2000s while searching for ways to deepen his faith, Chuck Huber of Bismarck began listening daily to the Eternal World Television Network radio station based in Irondale, Alabama, but aired internationally.
One day, while driving, he noticed an 800-number promising help in starting a local station.
“There are certain things in your life that you remember clearly,” he said, recounting how he pulled over to dial the number, and Doug Keck, one of the head honchos of the network, answered.
Keck connected him with Splonskowski, and Huber conveyed his dream of getting a station in the Bismarck-Mandan area.
In 2009, Huber got a call from Ed Schmitz, an RPR board member, pulling him away from pheasant hunting to have lunch and discuss the possibilities.
He and another interested local, Raymond Gruby, raised the needed $125,000, and on Oct. 12, 2010, they went live, with EWTN offering national content to fill in gaps in local programming.
“Catholic radio, as well as many of the publications of some of the apologists, all of those were instrumental in my coming back strongly to the Catholics faith and integrating that in my life,” said Huber, who became a board member and remains one today.
In the beginning, he said, many of the faithful and clergy were reluctant, but with the help of Bishop Zipfel, and later, Bishop Kagan, the station has become an integral part of the Catholic community there.
“Fairly frequently we’ll get an email, call or letter from some listener saying, “Hey, I just want you to know…I found your radio station and it’s changed my life,” Huber said. “Anytime you broadcast the truth, it has a way of infiltrating into people’s minds and hearts.”
Looking ahead
Lynne Devitt, current executive director who works out of the base office in Fargo, said she found the station by mistake.
Previously, Devitt worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota, where she had a successful 24-year career. But something was missing. “As a lifelong Catholic, I followed the faith, but I hadn’t taken the time to put everything together in a completely reasoned way,” she said.
Landing one day on one of the syndicated programs, Catholic Answers, she was intrigued.
Having received a graduate degree in language and rhetoric, Devitt was impressed with how the show invited Catholics and even non-believers to engage, using the Socratic method she’d learned in grad school.
“They put a reason around this faith that I had; it added a richness,” she said, admitting she had been “too lazy to figure it out on my own.” But then, “to realize there was a reason for the joy I had in my faith — that that these aren’t just rules but gifts — it was a changing of the narrative to some extent…and brought a greater beauty to my life.”
At the pandemic’s height, as “people were dying and losing their jobs, and businesses were being shut down,” she began donating.
“There’s a point where you just have this awakening that the only thing that I can really pass on that has value is my faith, and the only thing that matters is whether or not my kids get to heaven,” she said.
Eventually becoming a board member, Devitt was hired as executive director in 2023, and said Catholic radio — in all the ways it is now being channeled, including through its app and podcasts — is needed now more than ever.
“In society right now, people of faith are being attacked, and to some extent, we need an outlet, some kind of community, to say, ‘You’re not crazy. There’s a reason, there’s logic, there’s a community of believers far larger than this.’”
Catholic media, she said, aims to offer “respite for those who are exhausted from a media that maybe doesn’t give them the whole story.”
“We focus on truth, bound in a truth given to us by God,” she said, and inviting listeners into positive, engaging conversations, as well as approaching guests “not as adversaries, but people who are really trying to understand and seek truth.”
Devitt said that before she discovered RPR, she had a community of people.
“It was a community of politics that made me grumpy,” she said, noting that the dial switch was, for her, life-changing. “We have to choose the community we want to be part of. I want people to be part of a joy-filled community.”
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Oct. 27, 2024.]
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