Silence can be deafening

Since our last post about Jared's absence from the show there have been a couple of subtle changes on air. Both Lino's traditional opening line at the beginning of the show (I'm Lino Rulli, The Catholic Guy, here with Lou and Jared…), as well as his line thanking everyone at the end of the show (Thank you Lou, thank you Jared…) have quietly vanished, replaced with witty banter. If you have really good ears, you might also want to listen to the "Heeeeeeey" at the beginning of each show. How many voices in that chorus have you heard since August 18th? If your answer is "two", then you should have no problem passing your next hearing exam.

To add more to what is quickly becoming a conspiracy theory, Lino in a show last week made mention of "my producer" working on something that a caller asked about without mentioning Jared by name. And the couple of times that callers have actually mentioned Jared's name on air, Lino has artfully steered the conversation away from that direction. Smooth.

All circumstantial evidence, you say. Well, here's some more circumstantial evidence we uncovered: a job listing on the Sirius XM Careers web site advertising an open Producer position for The Catholic Guy Show. The only caveat is that this job wasn't posted recently, but back on June 23rd. For all we know the powers that be might've just been trying to bring a second producer on board. Then again…

So what is one to make of all this? We said in our last post that we were not suggesting something fishy was going on. Given the events and discoveries of the past few days, however, we are now changing our position… and our new position is this: we believe that Jared is no longer a part of The Catholic Guy Show.

We freely admit that we have no concrete proof of this… nothing on Lino's Facebook/Twitter pages, Jared's Facebook page, or anywhere else we could search on the Internet says anything about this subject. And if it turns out that we're wrong, we will gladly retract our statement and apologize humbly and profusely for making it. That being said, we can't simply ignore the evidence we've seen so far.

More importantly, we can't ignore the silence surrounding it. There may be perfectly legitimate and important reasons for not mentioning Jared's absence. Contractual requirements. A personal request not to say anything. Timing an announcement to coincide with the introduction of a new producer somewhere down the road (which is exactly what happened last October when Jared replaced Ryan Stewart). If any of those is the case, then we absolutely respect that.

But barring any of the reasons above, we're left to wonder why a constant on-air presence who brought a lot of laughter and creativity to the show has met such an inglorious end. Tom Falcone and Maureen McMurray got whole shows dedicated to them. Ryan didn't get a sendoff, but he was always a behind-the-scenes guy, and in any case was just moving to a different show on the same channel. Even phone screener Christine, who was never one to make a fuss about stuff like this, got a 15-minute farewell at the end of her last show.

Jared Rizzi? We'll probably find out what really happened at some point. In the meantime, though: silence. The deafening kind of silence that speaks volumes on its own.