In a recent audio history of the Catholic Church, in a section on thirteenth-century reforms and innovations, Christopher Bellitto speculated that if Francis of Assisi were alive now, he would have used social media: “He’d have a blog and a Twitter account and an Instagram account, because that’s where people are today.”
I was struck by this remark. While it wasn’t implausible, something about it felt disturbing, even contradictory. Would St. Francis really? And if he had in fact used YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram to spread his example of humility and embodied mercy, could he have done so and still come out a saint?
Digital evangelism has been discussed extensively of late. A recent Religion News Service article by Fiona Murphy covers the viral diocesan priest Fr. David Michael Moses, for whom social media isn’t a “tool” but a “mission field.” “People,” Fr. Moses says, “won’t let you into their homes, but they let you into their phones.” Bishop Robert Barron recently announced the expansion of his Word on Fire ministries to create a new order of priests dedicated specifically to digital evangelization. The first “digital saint”—Carlo Acutis, a millennial web designer who devoted his life to digitally documenting eucharistic miracles—will soon be canonized. And just this past week, the Vatican held a special Mass for Catholic influencers as part of the Jubilee of Youth, in which Pope Leo XIV urged “digital missionaries” to be faithful stewards of the Gospel in this era of technological acceleration and virtually mediated experience.
All of these instances suggest that the Church’s increasing institutional engagement with virtual space is here to stay. Digital technology, and social media in particular, is not just a tangential instrument but an integral dimension of the Church’s mission, an actual sphere of spiritual activity. Such technology thus entails a responsibility to exist in that space as a Church. In 2023, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication agreed, asserting that the faithful must “live in the digital world as loving ‘neighbors’ who are genuinely present and attentive to each other on our common journey along the ‘digital highways.’”
But what does it mean to evangelize on these “digital highways”? The Vatican’s language is oddly reminiscent of the “new territory” opened to evangelization in the era of European colonization. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff compares the asymmetrical power dynamics between social-media companies and their users to the encounter between colonists and Indigenous peoples. The long user agreements you scroll through when creating an account is like the Spanish Requirement—a “legal” document used to validate dispossession. Here, the exploited terrain is users’ very lives: their attention, their desires, and the data generated by their surveilled behavior. The “territory” is not the screen, but the people themselves.
Thus, while the Church has always engaged with new modes of information technology to articulate and rearticulate its teaching and mission in different ages—as in the era of the printing press—these technologies are not neutral. In A Web of Our Own Making, Antón Barba-Kay emphasizes that digital media are not only different from their predecessors in degree, but in kind: our online practices are reshaping what it means to be a human. How does this affect the way the Church spreads the Gospel?
For better or worse, digital space is indeed “where the people are.” At the same time, the prevailing structures of digital discourse (virality, clickbait, algorithmic curation, user surveillance, self-branding) can undermine the gesture of evangelization itself, and vitiate the process of sanctification into which it invites us. The stakes of this question are not theoretical: recent controversies in Catholic online circles have underscored how easily the performance of holiness on social media can fracture under real-world moral failings.
An essential aspect of the Gospel is its call to metanoia—the New Testament’s term for renewal, transformation, repentance, or conversion, which literally means a change (meta) of mind (noos). How can metanoia take place on platforms apparently designed to exploit the human mind, barrage it with content, addict it, and use algorithms to concretize users’ performative identity and ideological divisions? How can one “die to self” in the context of the self-creating machine?
These are not only questions for prospective converts, but for the evangelists themselves. St. Paul once boasted of becoming “all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” His phrasing highlights the complex relationship between the ego of the evangelist and the medium of evangelization in the digital age. This ambiguity does not originate with social media, but courses through the whole Christian tradition and spiritual traditions at large: the negotiation between power and sincerity, self-aggrandizement and self-emptying, sophist and saint.
A confession of my own is in order: I am a content creator with increasingly dubious feelings about the platforms I use. I’m also a recent convert to Catholicism, and I can trace at least part of my path to the Church through my ongoing engagement with Catholic content—an experience that has been at once spiritually enriching and psychosocially perilous. For more than a year, I’ve assented to the algorithmic incursion of viral priests, influencer apologists, and comment-section theologians into my feeds, exposing me to the bustling and often divisive virtual Church that weaves its theological chatter into the collective psyche of the physical one.
How can metanoia take place on platforms apparently designed to exploit the human mind?
Often baked into digital evangelization itself are various agglomerations of political ideology and patterns of identity performance that mirror the broader cultural conflicts and political divisions in contemporary American life. This is especially true with some of the most popular Catholic apologists on YouTube, whose theological conservatism often leads them to espouse conservative political positions as part and parcel of their evangelistic projects. The function of such apologetics, then, is sometimes less about spiritual transformation and more about prosecuting the culture war—such that its “fruits” are not behavioral and social goods, but intensifications of constructed identity and social division.
But while the digital sphere is in some ways designed to reinforce these ideologizing tendencies, it also has the power to disrupt them and produce surprising and generative syntheses of supposedly contradictory views. This is particularly important given the broader political implications of Christianity in America at present: the alignment of Christian fundamentalism with Trumpist populism and the entanglement of both with an increasingly powerful technocratic order.
While the Catholic Church and its theology are by no means exempt from this dynamic, Catholicism nevertheless possesses a unique capacity for resilience. Unlike Protestant Evangelicalism, which often fragments along political lines, the Catholic Church is capable of containing even deeply opposed views within a shared sacramental and institutional framework. This capacity for paradox, this unity-in-contradiction, gives it a distinctive potential to transcend ideological reduction and offer a more stable foundation for genuine renewal, even in digital space. This indeed is central to Leo’s message to Catholic online evangelists—that they be “agents of communion, capable of breaking down the logic of division and polarization.”
Questions about the nature of “digital evangelism” entail a more fundamental one about evangelization itself in the twenty-first century: What is its object? It’s not as though people on the internet have never heard about Jesus Christ—so what exactly is the good news? Is its primary object to clarify correct doctrine and convince the audience to accept it—a matter of orthodoxy, or “right belief”? Or is its purpose to effect some spiritual or behavioral transformation, a matter of orthopraxy, “right doing”?
The Czech priest Fr. Tomáš Halík contrasted these categories in a recent Commonweal interview. “Many Catholics in America,” he noted, “particularly those taken in by various internet apologist personalities—seem to attach great importance to proper doctrine (orthodoxy) without sufficient attention to both spiritual and ethical conversion (orthopraxy).” This distinction points to a broader dichotomy between “liberal” and “conservative” theology—the former tends to emphasize the “orthopractical” experience of faith, and the latter the “orthodox” interpretation of it.
In principle, theological commitments need not align with political ideologies—one might hold traditional views on gender and sacraments while advocating radical positions on labor or the environment. But in practice, particularly in digital spaces, theology is often flattened into political identity.
Overwhelmingly, the most popular Catholic apologists on YouTube have a conservative theological emphasis, and in many ways implicate themselves in cultural and political conservatism. A salient rhetorical goal of these channels is to convert Protestants to Catholicism—sometimes in the form of conversion stories (e.g., Matt Fradd’s Pints with Aquinas), sometimes in the form of theological expositions (e.g., Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery) and polemics (e.g., Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent).
Fradd, whose YouTube channel boasts 726,000 subscribers, conducts interviews with Catholic intellectuals, fellow apologists, clergy, and internet celebrities. He often does so while smoking a cigar or drinking, as the title implies, a pint of beer. There is some overlap with the aesthetics and audience of the “manosphere.” At the same time, Fradd’s interviews are also often sensitive, sincere, and interesting. He has a talent for eliciting poignancy from his guests, especially in their stories of conversion and devotional journeys of faith.
Some videos directly address political issues, such as his interview with retired theology professor Larry Chapp, cofounder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Pennsylvania. Fradd remarks that “there seems to be this divide between those who are intent on getting doctrine and liturgy right…and on the other side, those who are running soup kitchens and wanting to take care of the immigrant and the poor.” Fradd and Chapp articulate a desire to heal the political divisions within the Church—to bridge the gap between the “pro-life wing” and the “social justice wing,” and to advocate for a more holistic Catholicism that allows theological conservatives to also embrace radical economic and social commitments.
In practice, particularly in digital spaces, theology is often flattened into political identity.
But despite this openness, their conversation affirms a distinctly right-wing orientation, and focuses on extended criticisms of left-leaning Catholics—for example, their disparaging, caricatured portrayal of Catholic Worker houses as havens of secularized leftism. Fradd is asking the right questions, but doing so within a framework already shaped by the ideological contours he ostensibly critiques.
Thus, while these channels sometimes perform the rare service of articulating nuance and complexity in a digital culture otherwise dominated by polarization, their rhetorical framing—at times crafted to appeal to the ultra-traditionalist corner of Catholic internet culture—often risks reinforcing the very culture war the Church is equipped to transcend. I’m mindful that my own critique could easily fall into the same binary thinking. What draws me to Catholicism, after all, is precisely its catholicity: its ability to hold diversity and disagreement within one body.
There may be a growing self-awareness of this among online Catholic apologists. One of Fradd’s most recent episodes, a conversation with fellow apologist Keith Nester, explores the nuances and pitfalls of “The Age of Online Evangelism,” and the temptation implicit in the digital medium to capitalize on ideological divisions and doctrinal tribalism as a means of capturing viewer attention. As Fradd observes, “Criticism gets clicks…[but] you know what doesn’t go viral? Humility.”
Yet the aesthetics of these apologetics sometimes militate against that humility. Their titles and thumbnails lean heavily on provocation—Heschmeyer’s “Why Liberal Catholicism is Dying,” for instance, pairs a rainbow flag and a glowing-eyed “young based priest” with a black-and-white image of Fr. James Martin (never mentioned in the video) as a meme-ified emblem of liberal Catholicism. This kind of stylized antagonism and “edgy” clickbait reinforces the polarized framing these videos often claim to critique.
What do the aesthetics of such apologetics have to do with the Gospel? Do they merely serve as a mildly profane means to a sacred end, or do they in fact hinder the message they seek to convey?
Consider the difference between the aesthetic logic of the Gospel and that of clickbait. In clickbait, the aesthetic value of the visual is sheerly instrumental: it is designed to provoke, to anger, to convert attention into engagement. Like an advertisement, its purpose is to redirect the viewer, to serve a goal beyond itself. Propaganda works similarly, organizing aesthetic cues toward an ideological end.
By contrast, the Gospel is not akin to advertisement or propaganda. It is closer to art. Its aesthetic value is not merely instrumental, but intrinsic. It is not just a tool to get somewhere. It is itself an encounter with the end-in-itself; it is the good news. It seeks not a referral to another site, nor the adoption of a digital identity, but a conversion, an integrated experience of transformation and unification—the very opposite of the clickthrough “conversions” sought by digital marketers.
In this way, the highly aestheticized approach to orthodoxy reveals a shadow side: instead of inviting people into renewal, a release from the contingent, constructed self, it actually fabricates self by hardening identity structures. The concern with doctrine sometimes takes on a character that is not salvific but obsessive, a fetishizing preoccupation with the specificities of rules and rituals and sometimes even a grim fascination with the condemnation that may result from the failure to perform them.
This desperation for rules, identity, and order is understandable, especially for young people living in an era of technological acceleration and disorientation. Their confusion is compounded by the apparent breakdown of liberal democracy as the prevailing political framework—an unraveling that is, in many ways, a consequence of that technological acceleration—leaving us still in suspense as to what will fill the gap. In such conditions, doctrinal definiteness is powerfully seductive.
Identitarian Catholicism, with its offer of supreme magisterial authority, responds to the vacuum of authority created by these changed psychosocial and technological conditions. Its conservative theology offers a form of psychological stability, a pathway of identity, a “way to be.” But this “way of being” isn’t helpful unless it also comes with some kind of “way of doing”—a way of actually orienting us to the world.
This gap between a “way of being” and a “way of doing” has been brought into sharp relief recently by the scandal surrounding rising star Catholic apologist Alex Jurado (Voice of Reason). Jurado has been accused of sending sexually inappropriate messages to women, including a minor, prompting widespread controversy. Many of the channels discussed here have had to respond publicly, since they had hosted him on their shows. Audience reactions across this online apologist ecosystem have ranged from outrage to calls for empathetic prayer.
Of course, there has always been a gap between what the Church preaches and its failures to embody that purity. But the dynamics of online evangelism may magnify this gap. As Daniel Turner of The Catholic Herald commented, “You can’t make saints out of influencers.” At a minimum, it is far more difficult when online discourse fosters intensified forms of identity performance and dogmatic certainty, disembodied from one’s immediate community and personal life.
There are digital evangelists who are sensitive to these concerns. Breaking in the Habit, with 440,000 subscribers, is run by a Franciscan friar and priest, Fr. Casey Cole. He’s keenly aware of the structural problems inherent in digital evangelism, as well as the spiritual perils it exposes him to as both priest and believer. Last fall, Cole announced that he was suspending production for a while, declaring that social media was “jeopardizing [his] salvation.”
But Cole wasn’t gone for long. He returned in January 2025, with a video called “7 Deadly Social Media Sins of Catholics.” In it, he critiqued the trends of performative piety, divisive language, and outrage culture; yet, notably, he did so not with vitriol but with humility. Cole’s distinctively Franciscan curiosity and compassion and his seeking tone encapsulate the very thing that digital evangelism sorely needs: orthopathy, right feeling, which, in the context of the Gospel, is always a feeling–together, a sympathy.
Why are there not more Fr. Caseys, capable of offering a balanced representation of the Church as a whole, in digital spaces? It’s not a matter of matching conservative digital evangelism with an equal and opposite liberal counterpart, but rather of creating the conditions for the Gospel to disrupt and transcend that dichotomy. This requires resisting the seductions of the medium—like virality—and perhaps journeying to the digital peripheries. As Richard Rohr has put it, “the true good news of Jesus will never fill stadiums.”
But what happens when one does find a video that seems to speak directly to their spiritual path? Has God found us, or was it the algorithm? I’ve asked myself this very question, wondering whether my own journey into Catholicism is really just the result of predetermined accretions of data, through predictive algorithms and recommendation media. But this misunderstands the Gospel. When we truly encounter it, we are not merely engaging with a device or a medium, but with the transcendent Word that stands outside a deterministic system. Ultimately, you don’t choose the Word; the Word chooses you.
Dr. Bellitto’s speculation that St. Francis would have used social media does not imply that Francis would have wanted to be there. Instead, that’s where Francis would find the poor and afflicted: just as he once entered leper colonies and battlefields, risking physical harm, so would he go into these spaces that are rife with diseases of the mind. Perhaps the digital evangelist’s mission inherently involves this risk: to descend with us into the depths of self-representation—to find us there and reintegrate us, to find us on our phones in order to save us from our phones.
As noted, the culture of digital evangelism may now be awakening to this. In another of Fradd’s recent episodes, the Dominican priest Fr. Gregory Pine observes that digital evangelism is most valuable when it has the effect of replanting the faithful in the finite immediacy of their home parishes—to “get the roots of your soul into the metaphysical soil where you are.” But this finite, relational immediacy need not only occur in physical space. It can exist in virtual space, too—a “little way” of digital encounter that values smallness and finitude as resistance in a context in which social power is relentlessly quantified. Perhaps there is virtue, and something particularly evangelistic, in digital smallness: in small virtual communities, in forgotten corners of the internet, and in videos that have very few views.
Each week, Fr. Michael K. Holleran, a former Carthusian monk and semiretired priest who preaches at the parish of St. Monica, St. Elizabeth of Hungary & St. Stephen of Hungary on the Upper East Side of Manhattan sends me his recorded homilies. I edit and upload them to his very modest YouTube channel, where they seldom get more than a hundred views.
But these simple, unproduced, unadorned reflections are some of the most precious videos I’ve ever viewed online. They don’t ask to be watched; they just are, unadorned yet vital sites of the Living Word. This Word goes out into the world without regard for the way it will return to the speaker in a feedback loop of validation and recommendation. It can be heard and felt in any medium in which it appears, even in the fraught context of digital discourse.
Even though our interactions in digital space may be reshaping what it means to be human, they do not alter our relation to God, to the ground of our being—only how we perceive and access that ground. Digital space adds a new layer to our experience, a new stratum of hyperreality where we represent and often reconstitute ourselves in digital form. But as always, the work of spiritual practice is to order and integrate the layers of our experience—bodily, emotional, symbolic, and now digital—in a way that keeps us rooted in the source. This must be one of the key roles of digital evangelism: to remind us that that ground abides even here. Beneath and beyond our constructed identities and mediated realities, we can still trace our way back to the divine presence that transcends us yet regards us. This is the ground on which those who espouse seemingly opposing political ideologies can meet, in the communion that Pope Leo XIV has recently called the Church to reaffirm. And the Gospel, online or anywhere, is ultimately an invitation to meet there—and to love God and one another. As Leo exhorted the influencers during the special Mass: “It is not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter between hearts.”
Reproduced with permission by Commonweal.
