Ave Maria Radio
Ave Maria Radio is a Catholic radio programming producer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose nationally syndicated shows reach hundreds of stations through the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network. Listed in this directory as an Ann Arbor producer whose syndicated programmes reach hundreds of stations through EWTN, Ave Maria Radio is both a local broadcaster — it owns and operates stations in southeast Michigan, anchored by WDEO — and one of the most productive programme suppliers in English-language Catholic radio. At its recognised peak it produced more than twenty programme titles and over fifty hours a week of Catholic talk radio, distributed free to affiliate stations and carried additionally by streaming, mobile apps and satellite.
The organisation grew out of one of American Catholic media's defining partnerships: Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, provided the founding impetus and early funding, broadcaster Al Kresta provided the defining voice as president, chief executive and host of the flagship Kresta in the Afternoon, and EWTN, the global Catholic network founded by Mother Angelica, provided the distribution. Kresta's death on 15 June 2024 closed the founding era; the afternoon flagship continues as Ave Maria in the Afternoon with Dr. Marcus Peter. The programmes endure because the model was always larger than one host: a production house making faithful, interactive talk radio that local stations could air without producing it themselves.
Founding: Monaghan, Kresta and Ave Maria Communications
In 1997 Tom Monaghan took up an offer from EWTN founder Mother Angelica of free radio programming for any Catholic radio station, at a time when, in Ave Maria's own later description, the landscape of Catholic radio resembled a barren desert. In January 1997 Monaghan called Al Kresta, an experienced evangelical-turned-Catholic broadcaster, and asked whether he wanted to move to Ann Arbor to help create Ave Maria Communications. Kresta and his wife Sally had already determined to move to Ann Arbor that autumn, and the timing fell together. Monaghan funded the media enterprise for years, Kresta recalled, before its centre of gravity shifted as Monaghan turned toward Ave Maria University and its law school.
Accounts of the network's start differ slightly on the founding year: Ave Maria has been described as established in 1996 and as the first Catholic talk radio network, with its first station on air in fall 1996, while the Ann Arbor production operation Kresta came to build dates to 1997. By either reckoning, Ave Maria was present at the creation of modern American Catholic talk radio, when EWTN's affiliates could be counted in dozens rather than hundreds. Since around early 2004, Kresta said, Ave Maria Communications has been independent and listener-supported, with its own board, no longer asking Monaghan for financial support. The operation has run with a small staff — about a dozen people in profiles of its mature years — with most funding coming from listener donations.
The Michigan Stations: WDEO and Its Sisters
Ave Maria's local broadcasting base is WDEO 990 AM, serving the Detroit and Ann Arbor area. The frequency has a long history: it began operations in 1962 as WYNZ, a 250-watt daytime station on 1520 AM with a country format, passed through Top 40 and religious formats, changed calls to WYFC in 1974 as a Christian station, became an early outlet for contemporary Christian music, moved to 990 AM in late 1986 as WWCM, and increased its daytime power to 9,200 watts in the late 1990s, greatly improving its metropolitan Detroit coverage. Monaghan purchased WWCM in 1999 and renamed it WDEO, transferring the calls and Catholic format previously heard on AM 1290 in Saline, and moved the studios from Ypsilanti to the Domino's Farms complex near Ann Arbor.
In addition to WDEO, Ave Maria Radio is heard on WMAX in Bay City and WLCM in Lansing, and owns several FM translators in southeast Michigan, including signals in Dexter, Southfield and Midland. Kresta described owning and operating three stations in southeast Michigan as one half of what Ave Maria Communications does; the other half, programme production for the national network, is the half most listeners across the country ever encounter. Local Michigan programming includes shows such as Epiphany with Vanessa Denha Garmo and Michigan Mornings with Matthew Handley, alongside the national schedule.
The EWTN Relationship and National Distribution
Ave Maria's programmes are syndicated through the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network to more than 350 AM and FM stations across the United States, according to the network's current station history, and are also carried on EWTN's SiriusXM channel. Earlier milestones chart the growth: by its fifteenth anniversary in 2012, Ave Maria offered twenty different programme titles, including three live programmes airing weekly on EWTN's global network of nearly 200 stations, with streaming audio and Android and iPhone apps; by 2013, its vice president and general manager Mike Jones described 23 shows producing 54 hours per week of Catholic talk radio, reaching 230 stations in collaboration with EWTN. Teresa Tomeo's biography credits Catholic Connection alone with carriage on over 500 Catholic radio stations worldwide plus satellite.
The relationship is symbiotic rather than subordinate. EWTN, as Ave Maria's own hosts explain it, needs strong original talk programming in English to supply hundreds of affiliates, most of which cannot produce weekday programmes themselves; Ave Maria needs EWTN's affiliate network and satellite channel to reach a national audience from Ann Arbor. Doug Keck, EWTN's executive vice president and chief operating officer, marked Ave Maria's fifteenth anniversary by congratulating its professionals for their commitment to Catholic media evangelisation, and Ave Maria has been described as the world's largest producer of original English-language Catholic radio programming. Its standing offer to the wider movement, as Jones put it, was direct: let people buy, build and borrow radio stations, and Ave Maria would give them content free of charge.
Flagship Programmes
The flagship was Kresta in the Afternoon, hosted by Al Kresta weekdays from 4 to 6 p.m. Eastern, a current affairs and culture programme whose motto was to look at life through the lens of Scripture and the teachings and traditions of the Church. Kresta, who also served as the organisation's president and chief executive, became the most recognisable voice in American Catholic radio through the programme's mix of news analysis, author interviews and listener calls. Following his death in June 2024, the time slot continues as Ave Maria in the Afternoon, hosted live by Dr. Marcus Peter and listed in EWTN's current schedule under that title.
The morning flagship is Catholic Connection, hosted by Teresa Tomeo weekdays from 8 to 10 a.m. Eastern and co-produced by Ave Maria Radio and the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network. Tomeo brought more than thirty years of media experience to the programme, twenty of them as a secular reporter and anchor in the Detroit market, before leaving secular media in 2000 to found her own communications company; she is also an author of more than ten books, an EWTN television co-host and correspondent, and a frequent commentator on faith and media culture. Two long-running counselling programmes anchor the middle of the day: More2Life with Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak, applying the Theology of the Body teaching of Pope John Paul II to everyday family and personal problems, and The Doctor Is In with Dr. Ray Guarendi, a psychologist and father of ten offering parenting and relationship advice. Both air weekdays and invite listener calls.
The Wider Programme Family
Around the flagships sits a broad family of daily and weekly programmes that together fill affiliate schedules. Christ Is the Answer with Fr. John Riccardo, Fire on the Earth with Peter Herbeck and Food for the Journey with Sr. Ann Shields provide short daily teaching and reflection. Mast Appeal with Coleen Kelly Mast, Church and Culture with Deal Hudson, Epiphany with Vanessa Denha Garmo, and music and interview programmes such as Notes from Above fill weekend hours. Programmes connected with Renewal Ministries, the Ann Arbor-based Catholic renewal apostolate, add further voices from the same Michigan Catholic community that produced Ave Maria itself. Many of these programmes are also distributed as podcasts through Ave Maria's own feeds, extending their reach beyond affiliate schedules to on-demand listeners.
The editorial formula across the schedule, as Jones described it, is that all programmes seek to be faithful to Church teaching — because, as he noted, the audience knows if they are not — while also being pertinent, applicable to listeners' lives and interactive. Call-in participation is structural, not decorative: the major daily programmes publish a common listener line and build segments around calls, on the theory Kresta articulated that Catholic radio's principal mission is catechesis, teaching the faith to people ready to hear it, and that local, responsive radio gives the faithful hope and a training ground for the wider Church's communicators.
Al Kresta: Illness, Return and Legacy
No account of Ave Maria Radio is complete without Kresta's personal story, which became part of the network's witness. In 2003, during the winter following the network's early expansion, Kresta contracted necrotising fasciitis, a rare flesh-eating bacterial infection that nearly killed him and required the amputation of his left leg. He offered the suffering for Ave Maria Radio, returned after about six months of recovery as president and chief executive, and hosted from a wheelchair for the remaining two decades of his life, speaking openly about how Catholic teaching on suffering carried him through the crisis. He died on 15 June 2024 at the age of 72, survived by his wife Sally and their five children, and was memorialised across Catholic media as a central figure in the revival of Catholic broadcasting in the United States.
Kresta's analysis of his own medium, given in a 2018 interview, anticipated the network's later direction: he argued that the previous generation of Catholic radio had been spent defending the faith and papal teaching, while the next generation would need to help listeners distinguish what requires religious assent from what remains a matter of prudential judgment — a more catechetical, less purely polemical mission. The continuation of his slot under a new host and a new name, rather than in endless repeats, suggests the institution absorbed that lesson: the programme was a format and a mission, not only a personality.
Funding, Scale and Place in Catholic Media
Ave Maria Radio operates as a listener-supported ministry. After its early years of Monaghan funding, it has relied since about 2004 principally on donations from listeners, supplemented by its owned stations' support, with a staff of roughly a dozen producing a schedule that much larger organisations would struggle to match. That leanness is possible because distribution costs fall on the EWTN affiliate system and because hosts such as Tomeo, Guarendi and the Popcaks run established independent ministries and practices alongside their programmes, bringing their own audiences and expertise to the shared schedule.
Within American religious broadcasting, Ave Maria occupies a specific niche: it is not a network that owns hundreds of stations, like some ministry broadcasters, nor a single local station with a local mission. It is a production house — closer in structure to a syndicator or a news agency for talk radio — whose Ann Arbor studios supply the weekday spine of the largest Catholic radio network in the world. For the hundreds of small Catholic stations launched by parishes, dioceses and lay apostolates since the late 1990s, that supply was often the difference between a viable full-time schedule and silence.
At a Glance
Ave Maria Radio is a Catholic radio producer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, created as Ave Maria Communications in 1997 at the initiative of Tom Monaghan with broadcaster Al Kresta, independent and listener-supported since around 2004. It owns and operates WDEO and sister stations and translators in southeast Michigan, and produces nationally syndicated programmes — including Catholic Connection, More2Life, The Doctor Is In and the afternoon flagship now hosted by Dr. Marcus Peter — distributed through the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network to more than 350 stations and via satellite, streaming and podcasts. Its official website is avemariaradio.net. Its history, from a near-empty Catholic radio landscape in 1996 to a mature national schedule, is in large part the history of American Catholic talk radio itself.
