This Lake Country native
keeps his mission close to home
with far-reaching effects.
Answering an Invitation
WRITTEN BY FELICIA SCHNEIDERHAN
PHOTOS COURTESY OF bulldogCATHOLIC
Father
Mike Schmitz
You may know Father Mike Schmitz from his wildly popular “The Bible in a Year” podcast. You may know his warm, relatable (and fast!) homilies from YouTube, or recognize his charming smile from billboards in New York City’s Times Square. You may have read one of his many articles or one of his five books. Or you may be wondering, “Father Mike who?”
​
If you live in Lake Country, you may know Mike Schmitz as that kid who used to bike around the Arboretum, who used to run cross country at Brainerd High School, who grew up just down the street and lived in the Lakes Region his whole life. That was until he left for college and his calling and then became one of the most recognizable voices of the Catholic Church today.
​
No matter how far his reach travels, Lake Country holds a special place in Schmitz’s heart. His parents moved to the area when he was a baby. “They used to vacation in the area,” he recalls. “They said, ‘Why don’t we just live where we love to vacation?’” Some of his favorite childhood memories are of the outdoors, running, biking, skiing, and of course, being on the water. “I am so grateful to have been able to spend those summers out on the lake,” he says.
​
After graduating from Brainerd High School, Schmitz left the area (“which no one who lives here ever wants to do, but I had to,” he says) to attend St. John’s University and St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. In 2003, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest for the Diocese of Duluth. He is currently chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, a position he has held for more than two decades, and director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Duluth.
​
University of Minnesota Duluth alumni, who were students during the early years of Schmitz’s tenure, recall how his conversational, real-world, culturally relevant style resonated with them as students, helping them keep their moral center and find inspiration during the often-fraught transition into adulthood.
​
“He married us,” one recently told me. “This was before, you know . . .”
​
Before he got famous, that is.
​
Schmitz was not looking to become the internet phenomenon that many know him to be today. But online platforms like podcasts and YouTube have provided the vehicle for his message and style to reach beyond northern Minnesota to people all over the world.
​
“Everything that’s happened has come out of an invitation from someone else or a felt need that I either had myself or I saw that echoed in the hearts of our students here,” Schmitz says. He is inspired by the people close to home; if students are asking questions or struggling with certain topics, Schmitz reasons there may be more people seeking in a similar way.
“One of the missions I have, and I think that many of us have, is to see the people around us and say, ‘Here’s the truth: The truth is you actually do matter, and the truth is, you matter because God knows your name, and you matter to him.’”
In 2007, one of his college students suggested he make a podcast. The student made a strong case that, while Schmitz worked with students while they were in college, a podcast would extend his ability to serve them beyond those four years. Schmitz describes how the student gave him a recorder and told him to hit record when he started talking and stop when he was done, and the student would clean it up, upload it, and maintain it. “And I was like, ‘Okay, sure, piece of cake for me.’”
​
Then in 2015, Schmitz was approached by Ascension Press. “They said, ‘People are living on YouTube. If we give you a camera and a microphone, would you be willing to record what you’ve been teaching the students on campus in five-to-ten-minute snippets?’” Thus his on-screen work began.
​
The next leap came in 2020 as Schmitz felt a need to respond to the pandemic: “I was like, ‘Man, so many people, including myself, are so distracted, so distressed, and there’s all these competing voices and competing opinions on what to do with life,’ and I was like, ‘You know what I wish? I wish that there was a podcast that you could listen to every single day and it would just be the Bible, and in the course of 365 days you would hear the whole Bible.’”
​
He approached Ascension Press, and they were excited by the idea. Schmitz was right about the need and the path to address it: In January 2021, “The Bible in a Year” hit number-one podcast in the United States and one million downloads. The following year, in January 2022, “The Bible in a Year” podcast hit the same number-one spot. In January 2023, Schmitz debuted the “The Catechism in a Year.”
​
In addition to posting weekly homilies, Schmitz continues to give many other talks online. In one recent Ascension Presents talk, he elaborates on a well-known quote from Mother Teresa: “God does not ask us to be successful; he asks us to be faithful.” Schmitz goes on to explain: “We’re doing our best—we’re trying—but we can’t control the outcome. We try and fail, get up, stumble, fall. This day, maybe God is saying, ‘Get up one more day, take one more step forward. Let those difficult steps be a prayer.’”
Despite a busy speaking and travel schedule, Fr. Schmitz keeps things real and down-to-earth in his Minnesota home. “He’s just a regular guy,” said a youth retreat attendee. “We can relate to him.”
As a result of this online presence, Schmitz has become a highly sought speaker and is frequently on the road. Despite his broad reach, he keeps his focus on the people he serves first: the students.
​
Currently serving in his twenty-first year on campus, he is highly attuned to the shifting tides among students: “Beginning of the last decade, some psychologists and social scientists have pointed out that anxiety surpassed depression as the primary mental illness that students were facing on college campuses.” The mental health and well-being of college students is a “top concern” among college administrators, according to research gathered in April of 2025 by the American Council on Education. Anxiety and depression have greatly increased over the past decade, with 76 percent of students reporting moderate or high levels of stress in the past thirty days. This trend caught Schmitz’s attention, leading him to ask, “What’s going on in the heart, in the mind, that is leading these young people? It’s not a place of depression. It’s a place of fear, you know, this place of anxiety over the future. And this was out before Covid but also during Covid. There’s this kind of generalized anxiety over life and the question of life. This sense of, Why am I here? Do I matter?”
“We try and fail, get up, stumble, fall. This day, maybe God is saying, ‘Get up one more day, take one more step forward. Let those difficult steps be a prayer.’”
Schmitz sees his work and the presence of the Newman Center on campus as a way to help students deal with these questions. “One of the missions I have, and I think that many of us have, is to see the people around us and say, ‘Here’s the truth: The truth is you actually do matter, and the truth is, you matter because God knows your name, and you matter to him.’ My mission would be to try to communicate that as best I can to as many people as I can.”
​
His mission also extends to working with middle and high school students as the director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Duluth. Sonya Morris, director of Faith Formation at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary in Duluth, sees the powerful results of Schmitz’s work with these students, particularly at retreats and summer camps. “We’re incredibly grateful we have him here with us,” she says. “He’s able to connect with the kids and bring it to the level where they’re at. He’s just got a presence about him, being such an active role model and witness, and being someone who’s fit and out there doing all these things.”
​
“And while many of the kids know Father Mike first from his internet fame,” says Morris, they quickly realize, “he’s just a normal guy. That’s so important. He’s there as a priest, for them, not as a famous person. They see him on a personal level but also know how influential he is and how special it is to be there with him.”
Fr. Schmitz serves with a ”boots on the ground” approach, and often outdoors. He’s pictured here on a hike with students and staff to a popular overlook close to the University of Minnesota Duluth campus.
“I think greatness is not having a lot of people know who you are. It’s about the people who are close to you. Do they know how much you care about them?”
She adds, “He likes to talk. When he gets going, he does not pay attention to time. He’s always moving at a very quick pace. If you’ve ever seen him process into Mass, he runs. That’s just how he is. From one thing to the next. He talks extremely fast. When you hear him on the podcast, they don’t have him on one-and-a-half speed. That’s just how he talks.”
​
Schmitz says that his travels around the world reinforce the values that make his hometown in Lake Country unique. “I think that there’s something really powerful about the attitude,” he says. “One of the things that’s always marked this area is a ‘We can do it’ attitude. There is a risk-taking muscle in most people in the Lake Country. There’s a sense of agency. And then you get a culture that’s created on a culture of agency—that we actually can do something that will make this place better.”
​
That culture and the people who make it unique are central to the heart of all Schmitz does. “When I come home and come back here, the students don’t care how many people I got to speak to. All they want to know is, do you care about us? That’s just so humbling. I think greatness is not having a lot of people know who you are. It’s about the people who are close to you. Do they know how much you care about them? That’s the metric I try to use to evaluate doing life.”
”The Bible in a Year”
podcast has taken more than
a million listeners through the entire
Bible with a daily twenty- to twenty-five-minute episode that includes readings, reflections, and prayers.