Fr. Chris Decker

Fr. Chris Decker is a priest of the Diocese of Baton Rouge. He was ordained a priest in 2007 at St. Joseph Cathedral.

He previously served as the pastor of the clustered parishes of St. James Catholic Church in St. James, LA and St. Philip Catholic Church in Vacherie, LA.

Prior to that assignment, he served as administrator of St. Thomas More in Baton Rouge and as parochial vicar at St. Jude in Baton Rouge and Immaculate Conception in Denham Springs.  His diaconate internship took place at Sacred Heart Church in Baton Rouge.

Fr. Decker also has been a part of several apostolates in the new evangelization. He began this mission of teaching the Faith though new media well before the Church was popularizing it.

In 1999, as a young seminarian, he cut his teeth at the diocesan owned Catholic Life Television as a creative consultant developing graphic art, motion graphics, designing websites, and even producing and hosting programming. One of his early successes was a show for youth called “FishNet” that ran on CatholicLife Television for several years.

As a seminarian he and two of his fellow classmates, Joshua LeBlanc and Fr. Ryan Humphries, developed an online community for seminarians called CyberCatholics.com around the year 2000 before blogging was “a thing”. On this proto-blog, Fr. Decker wrote and drew a comic strip about a seminarian who visited famous bible passages and had adventures within the Scriptures. Some German Catholic readers found his work, began to translate it for their audience, and nicknamed his blog "part of the Catholic underground".

Fr. Decker registered that name which later became the trademark of one of his most identifiable new media creations, the Catholic Underground podcast. It launched in 2006 during his diaconate internship and is still in production today at catholicunderground.com, on the radio, and nationwide on affiliates of CatholicTV and The Catholic Faith Network.

In 2011, he and his podcasting co-hosts took all of this a step further by developing and hosting and a Catholic new media conference in Houston, TX called CatholiCon.

He is also the Director of Mission for Catholic Community Radio, in Baton Rouge & New Orleans, LA. Fr. Decker sits on the board of directors for this apostolate that he also helped launch.  Here he develops new programming and helps to reach beyond the radio waves into new forms of evangelization on the digital continent.

Ordained a priest in 2007, he is presently the pastor of St Joseph Church in Grosse Tête, Louisiana; Immaculate Heart Church in Maringouin; and St Frances Xavier Cabrini Church in Livonia.  In the summer of 2018, he walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain and prayed at many pilgrimage sites throughout Europe while on a four month spiritual sabbatical.

He can be found online frequently sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram at the handle @digitalcatholic. He loves what he does, loves to teach others, and loves being a priest.