Domus 3.0 - Fast, Give, and Groups Arrive in the & Altar App

Last week I wrote about Domus 2.0 - household sharing, patron saints, the monthly patronal letter, and the app design refresh. That launch was significant on its own.

But it was not the whole story. What arrives later this week completes something we have been working toward for a long time.

Alongside the Domus 2.0 features, three more additions are here. Together they mark what I have been calling Domus 3.0 - the moment when Domus becomes fully what it was designed to be.

Fast arrives

In Matthew 6, Christ speaks of three practices as though they are obvious - prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. He does not say "if you fast" but "when you fast." Fasting was assumed. It has always been part of Christian discipleship.

Domus has served prayer beautifully for over a year. This week, it begins serving fasting too.

The new Fast tab in the & Altar app opens each morning with the Church's invitation for that day:

Fridays throughout the year, with abstinence from meat as the historic and continuing invitation
Wednesdays for men, a traditional Saint Joseph day when men fast in intercession for the women in their lives
Ember Days each season, the ancient quarterly fasts for the sanctification of the clergy and the fruits of the earth
Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, when the entire Church fasts and abstains
Fridays in Lent, with the additional invitation to enter more deeply into the season
First Fridays, consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Vigils of major solemnities, when the Church has traditionally prepared through fast and prayer

Each invitation includes an explanation of the day's meaning, a way to offer your fast for a specific intention, and a warm acknowledgment that fasting from food is not appropriate for everyone. If pregnancy, illness, medication, eating disorder recovery, or other circumstances make physical fasting unsafe, Domus offers alternatives - extra prayer, small self-denial, offering another form of sacrifice.

Every subscriber has a personal streak visible only to them. There are no leaderboards. No comparisons. Not even your household sees your practice. This is between you and God alone.

Give arrives

Alongside Fast, the Give tab completes the theological package. If prayer is one wing of the Christian life and fasting is the second, almsgiving is the third.

The Give tab presents a daily invitation to sacrificial giving. Not every gift is monetary - many are simply small sacrifices for others.

Weekdays offer small daily giving invitations - skip a coffee and give the money away, spend fifteen minutes helping someone who needs it, give up something you would have bought
Fridays carry the penitential character of the day, connecting giving to the Cross
Weekends shift the emphasis to Church support and tithing - not because the Church needs the money, but because our souls need the practice
Feast days connect giving to the specific saint being celebrated - Saint Vincent de Paul's day points to the poor, Saint Damien of Molokai's day points to the sick, Saint Katharine Drexel's day points to racial justice, Our Lady of Guadalupe's day points to indigenous Catholic communities

Domus has drafted fifty feast day giving invitations across the liturgical year. Each connects the saint's charism to a specific way to give - directly to a person, to a Catholic ministry, or to your parish.

Sacrificial giving is not measured in percentages. It is measured in intention. A widow's coin is worth more than a rich man's excess. Your ten dollars given from real sacrifice matters more than your hundred dollars given from surplus.

Give what you can, freely and generously. Trust God with the rest.

The Mass connection

There is one theological anchor I want to name explicitly, because it is the heart of everything Give proposes:

Our giving is inherently tied to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. At the Offertory, listen to the prayers of the priest. He speaks of the bread and wine we offer as "which earth has given and human hands have made" and "fruit of the vine and work of human hands." What we bring to the altar - the fruit of our labor, our very lives - is united to Christ's Paschal Mystery and offered to the Father for the salvation of the world.

Every gift you make outside of Mass is a preparation for what happens at Mass. Every gift becomes part of what Christ offers on the altar. This is why we give sacrificially. Not because the Church needs it. Not because we owe it. Because our giving is joined to His giving, and His giving saves the world.

Groups arrives

Household features address the domestic church. What about the rest of your Catholic life - your parish friends, your workplace colleagues, the men or women you meet with weekly, the friends who pray with you across distance?

That is what Groups are for.

Groups in Domus are voluntary Catholic associations of adult subscribers who choose to walk together in prayer. Any paid subscriber can create a Group or join one. Groups share:

A patron saint chosen from a library of over thirty
Prayer intentions within the Group
Feast day observances the Group observes together
A bulletin board for staying in touch
Prayer log preserving what the Group has done together
For Iron & Altar Men's Groups and Vessel & Altar Women's Groups: the weekly Small Group Discussion Guide, now surfaced directly in-app for meetings

Groups are adult-only. Household owners tag which of their household members are 18 or older before those members can create or join Groups. Young Disciples (YDS) subscribers are excluded from Groups regardless of any other setting - YDS remains a teen-only space with age-appropriate privacy protections.

Iron & Altar Small Groups and Vessel & Altar Small Groups continue to be available as subscription products at $149 per year for up to twelve members. The Small Groups page has full details for parish leaders and small group founders. Existing subscribers can also form free-of-charge Groups using their existing subscription - a workplace prayer group, a group of parish friends, a family scattered across cities who want to pray together.

Groups patrons

Every Group needs a patron saint. Domus has curated a library of thirty patrons spanning:

Traditional confraternity patrons - Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Louis de Montfort, Saint Alphonsus Liguori
Men's group patrons - Saint Joseph, Saint John Paul II, Blessed Solanus Casey, Venerable Fulton Sheen, Saint John Bosco
Women's group patrons - Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Edith Stein, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, Blessed Chiara Luce Badano, Saint Faustina Kowalska
Workplace patrons - Saint Katharine Drexel, Saint Frances of Rome, Saint Homobonus (the patron of Catholic businesspeople)
Parish patrons - Saint John Vianney, Saint Isidore of Seville, Venerable Pierre Toussaint
Universal patrons - the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Heart, Our Lady Undoer of Knots, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Michael the Archangel
Culturally rooted patrons - Saint Juan Diego, Blessed Miguel Pro, Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Saint Rose of Lima

Each patron has been illustrated in the same warm watercolor style as your path patrons. When you enter your Group, the patron's card fades in with the invocation - "Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us" - before the Group content appears.

Groups are voluntary Catholic associations, and they have always been part of Church tradition. Confraternities, sodalities, third orders, small groups - Catholics have always chosen to walk together beyond their households. Now Domus provides infrastructure for this ancient practice.

Family reorganized

Alongside these three major additions, the Household tab has been renamed to Family and reorganized:

This Week Together now appears at the top, showing how your household has been praying this week
Prayer Intentions, Feast Days, and Prayer Log follow
Household Members and the invite flow move down where they belong

The philosophy shifted: the tab now leads with spiritual life (how the family is praying together) rather than administration (who is in the household). Family members are still visible, but they are moved down because they are relationship and identity content, not daily action content.

Adult tagging

To enable Groups, household owners need a way to indicate which of their household members are 18 or older. The new Adult Tagging feature in the Family tab handles this simply - as household owner, you mark each member as Adult or Not yet an adult. Only adults can create or join Groups.

This is on the honor system. Domus does not independently verify ages. The trust here is between the household owner and Domus - marking a minor as an adult violates our Terms of Service and could result in restricted Groups access for the household.

Bottom navigation update

To accommodate the new tabs, the & Altar app bottom navigation has been redesigned:

Six tabs. Each carrying its weight in your daily spiritual life. Path management moves into the Account tab, where subscription management and personal settings already live.

What is live now

Most of these features are live now on WeAreDomus.com, or will be in the coming days. The & Altar app updates will roll out to Apple App Store and Google Play Store this week.

If you are already a Domus subscriber, watch your app for the update notification. When you next open the app, you will see the new bottom navigation and can explore each new tab.

What comes next

Domus is not finished. This is not the last thing we will add.

But this is the moment when Domus becomes fully what it was designed to be. Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving - the three-fold spiritual practice from Matthew 6. Family and Groups - the domestic church and the wider Body of Christ. Thirty-eight patron saints between paths and Groups - the communion of saints as real companions.

I am grateful you are walking with Domus.

For prospective subscribers

If you are reading this and not yet a Domus subscriber, this is a good moment to try Domus with a 7-day free trial.

Consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

More July Features - Fast, Give, and Groups Complete the Domus Vision