A new generation of Catholic ‘mom bloggers’ comes of age.
When I was in my thirties, feminist theology saved my life, or at least my faith life. I had just gone through a heartbreaking divorce that had pummeled my self-esteem. God seemed distant, and the Catholic Church—which had been so interwoven with my marriage—was a source of pain rather than comfort. I would go to Mass, sit in the back, and cry.
Then, God intervened. I met a woman who invited me to join a spirituality book group with a half-dozen other women interested in a feminist take on religion. Most of us were Catholic or former Catholics. We read Joyce Rupp and Joan Chittister and Marianne Williamson and talked about how we saw the divine working in our own lives. At a center of feminine spirituality founded by a Catholic laywoman and a Mercy sister, I found a circle of women on similar spiritual paths and a spiritual director who helped me make sense of my fractured relationship with the Church. Later, in graduate school, I studied with feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether.
Feminist theology gave me something that I wasn’t finding elsewhere in my faith. It not only helped me make sense of the patriarchal structures in the Church and world, it also prompted me to reclaim parts of Christian spirituality that had gotten buried: trust in my own intuition, a connection with nature and my own body, and an experience of the power of women’s circles.
Later, when I remarried and became a mother, my connection to these circles weakened. The spirituality center had closed, and my women’s book group gathered less frequently as our lives got busier. It was the early 2000s, and people were beginning to connect in a different way: the blog. I was introduced to blogging through the adoption community, where I found not only information but solace during the drawn-out process of adopting our children. But international adoption attracted a lot of conservative Evangelical Christians, and their “mom blogs” didn’t resonate with me. While I appreciated their tips about co-sleeping and potty training, it became clear a good number of them had little respect for the racial diversity their own families represented. And when they started supporting Donald Trump for president in 2015, I knew I needed a different community.
What I had yearned for—an online community of feminist women talking about life, including motherhood and their spiritual lives—would not come until later. It took Catholic Millennials, who were more comfortable combining motherhood, feminism, and faith, for Catholic mom bloggers to come of age.
Single mother Melinda Roberts is credited with creating the first mommy blog—TheMommyBlog.com—in 2002, although Heather Armstrong, known as “Dooce,” was blogging around the same time. (Armstrong, who died last year by suicide, was hailed as “queen of the mommy bloggers” in her New York Times obituary.) These writers put a spotlight on the home, with commentary about marriage and parenting often interwoven with discussion of cooking, decorating, and crafts. With the launch of WordPress and MySpace in 2003, niche blogs became ubiquitous. By 2005, a new blog was created almost every second.
There were few or no feminist spirituality mom blogs when I became a mother. But there were Catholic mom blogs. Most of them had coalesced around a website called CatholicMom.com, which Lisa Hendey founded in 2000. She had been seeking companionship and resources for her two young sons and found a community of like-minded women through the era’s online message boards. “I was relieved to know there were other people like me out there,” Hendey recalled when we spoke recently. “We believed that what we do in our homes really matters, both in terms of our own spirituality and in the overall formation for our kids.” Hendey said she overtly decided not to be political, so as to be welcoming to everyone. “I never wanted it to be an environment where we talked about traditional versus progressive practices of religion,” she said. “Back then it worked beautifully.”
But the Church was already beginning to move rightward, and as some of the CatholicMom writers got book deals with Catholic publishers and speaking gigs at Catholic events, the more conservative slant of many of the bloggers became apparent, in both their Church politics and their Republicanism. In some ways, they were mirroring other mom bloggers, many of whom were Evangelical Christians or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All these women—the vast majority of them white—were in situations in which they could afford to be stay-at-home mothers and, frequently, homeschoolers. CatholicMom has since been acquired by Holy Cross Family Ministries, and it continues to offer daily blog posts, gospel reflections and activities, and a weekly podcast. (Holy Cross Family Ministries was founded by now-venerable Fr. Patrick Peyton, famous for spreading devotion to the rosary and his saying, “The family that prays together, stays together.”)
One of the original CatholicMom contributors was Danielle Bean, who is emblematic of that first generation of Catholic mom bloggers. She was a homeschooling mom of six when she started writing about motherhood for CatholicMom as well as for the National Catholic Register and Faith & Family magazine. (Both of those publications had ties to the Legionaries of Christ.)
Bean is now a grandmother, but her current look is hip, with her headshot featuring her wearing a black T-shirt that says “Wifey. Mama. Lucky.” Her book titles emphasize positivity and self-improvement: Momnipotent: The Not-So-Perfect Woman’s Guide to Catholic Motherhood, You Are Enough, and You’re Worth It. Bean validates “the dignity and importance of motherhood” while also helping women tap into their “feminine strengths,” the book promo copy says. Her work is described as “comforting,” “relatable,” “practical,” and “heart-tugging.”
There’s a place for “comforting,” especially in a book that’s comparable to “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Catholic Moms.” But women looking for depth, feistiness, and brutal honesty won’t find them here, and they certainly won’t encounter any challenge to the patriarchy. Instead, what the books are selling is an idealized version of motherhood, one that acknowledges the challenges of contemporary mothering but that ultimately sees nurturing as women’s natural role. Complementarity is king.
Bean is much more than a blogger these days; like many mom bloggers/writers, she has become a lifestyle brand. Although she officially serves as the brand manager for CatholicMom, she also manages her own content portfolio: a weekly podcast and accompanying Substack called Girlfriends, various speaking engagements, and The Gist, a women’s talk show on CatholicTV. The Gist seems modeled on The View, with Bean and two other cohosts chatting about everything from chores to modesty to how crises have strengthened their faith.
At some point, blogging became influencing, and thoughtful, long-form prose gave way to quick-take videos and eventually product recommendations, endorsements, and sponsorships. These trends further encouraged presenting an idealized and distorted view of motherhood and womanhood. For these “content creators,” everything in life becomes performative and fodder for the brand—even their religion, their parenting, and their children.
Theologian Cathleen Kaveny finds the rise of “professional moms”—stay-at-home mothers who import the competitive standards of the work world to their roles as parents—to be problematic. This is compounded when they become influencers, which makes them “the star of their own show,” she says. When you combine parenting and piety, it gets even more complicated. “It used to be that mother-and-child was a relationship; it wasn’t like you had a job,” Kaveny told me. “This generation of stay-at-home moms have made it a profession. It’s a way of focusing exclusively on your own kids. And the Catholic version of these kinds of parents are the same—they’re just trying to get their kids into heaven, not Harvard.”
Bean is not the only Catholic mom influencer out there these days. One of her Gist cohosts, Rachel Balducci, used to have a blog named “Testosterhome”—a reference to living with five sons (now also one daughter). Her books also give a Catholic stamp to typical self-help advice: Overcommitted: Cut Chaos and Find Balance, Make My Life Simple: Bringing Peace to Heart and Home, No Such Thing as Ordinary: Unlocking Your Extraordinary Life through Everyday Encounters with Jesus. These books do a decent job of capturing a “spirituality of the everyday,” but the rather simplistic messages to “trust Jesus” fail to offer anything new or enlightening in the privileged-white-mommy-memoir genre.
From that same generation of Catholic mom bloggers is Elizabeth Foss, who chronicled her life as a homeschooling mom of nine at her website In the Heart of My Home before transitioning to becoming a “Catholic mindset coach” through Metanoia Catholic, an organization that blends personal development with Catholicism, without the dangers of being “led astray” by New Age thinking. As a coach, Foss describes herself as committed to healthy living in body, mind, soul, and spirit, “wholeheartedly committed to helping you live your abundant life.”
Almost in a category by herself is Kendra Tierney Norton, a Southern California mom of ten who could be called the Martha Stewart of Catholic mom bloggers for her attempts to weave together the Church’s liturgical practices with the domestic arts. Her blog and book of the same name—“Catholic All Year”—are a veritable encyclopedia of helpful tips, from ideas for children’s costumes for All Saints Day to feast-day recipes to tips on “how to be Catholic in the car.”
Tierney Norton has a jokey, sometimes sarcastic style that wards off intimidation from the professional-level photos of seemingly perfect homemaking. For example, readers are reassured that they, too, can make homemade rosaries “with no special tools and almost no knots (because knots are hard).” Even her reflections on becoming a widow after her first husband’s death from melanoma in 2022 are catchy and kitschy: “On Not Being a VSW (Very Sad Widow).”
Over the two decades of Tierney Norton’s career, she has been affiliated with various like-minded Catholic groups, including Endow (“Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women”) and Formed, a video-streaming project of the conservative, Colorado-based Augustine Institute. She also is a regular contributor at Blessed Is She, an online “sisterhood” that has become the latest home for many Catholic Millennial mom bloggers. The site was modeled on similar Evangelical online communities that offered women daily devotionals and a sense of belonging. Founded in 2014, Blessed Is She quickly grew from a handful of bloggers to a for-profit business endeavor with retreats, products, and its own app. Its “prayer products” shop features everything from planners to jewelry to Stanley-type water bottles.
Author Shannon K. Evans, who converted to Catholicism via the Catholic Worker movement, started out as part of Blessed Is She. She described the community as “pretty moderate”—until more right-leaning readers began complaining to owner Jenna Guizar about Evans’s views on her personal blog, where she advocated for women’s ordination and spoke about her love of yoga. Things changed after Guizar obtained an endorsement from her local prelate, now-emeritus Bishop Thomas Olmsted. He is best known for excommunicating a nun who permitted an abortion at a Phoenix hospital to save the mother’s life.
Evans wrote monthly scriptural reflections for Blessed Is She and authored one of its Advent books, a part-time job that was lucrative for a Catholic writer. But a second book of reflections by Evans was pulled from the printer after pressure from Olmsted, she told me. Apparently, her opinions on her own blog that criticized patriarchy and Donald Trump while praising the enneagram and Nuns on the Bus were too much.
The controversy led to an exodus in 2018 of nearly all of the more progressive and moderate writers from Blessed Is She. For Evans, the ordeal, while painful, was a wake-up call to how she had disconnected from her authentic voice by self-censoring her feminism in Christian circles and her Christianity in feminist circles. It ultimately prompted a return to her own instincts, which told her the two were complementary.
In her new book, The Mystics Would Like a Word, Evans describes how women, especially religious women, are socialized to trust the authority of outside voices rather than their own intuition. “It can feel safer to look for the kingdom of heaven outside of ourselves, to look for it in authority figures, religious culture, or the safety net of orthodoxy,” she writes. “There is a certain kind of felt security that comes with believing someone else knows more than we do, that somehow they have reached transcendent answers we are not even capable of touching.” That chapter’s title suggests otherwise: “Trusting Yourself Doesn’t Make You a Heretic.”
The book explores six mystics—Teresa of Ávila, Margery Kempe, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Catherine of Siena—whom Evans interprets as having subversive lessons for today’s women. Evans says she hopes the book “carries the torch of the contemplative Catholic tradition, just with more sarcasm and the occasional curse word.” One reviewer says the book “redefines Catholic womanhood.”
Her previous books follow in the same vein. The bestselling Rewilding Motherhood, on its face, doesn’t look much different than other Catholic mom bloggers’ books. Its promo copy says it “helps women deepen their connection to God through practices inherent to the life they’re living now.” But Evans, a mother of five, has a feminist sensibility that remembers that “we were women before we were mothers.” The environmental term “rewilding” means to return land to its original state. Evans asks, “What if we could rewild motherhood? What if, instead of confining women to some narrow social standard, motherhood could be the very thing to return us back to our original state as image bearers of an untamed God?”
In her 2023 book, Feminist Prayers for my Daughter, Evans penned a unique collection that includes a prayer for celebrating breasts, a petition for body acceptance, and one “for getting her butt into counseling.” The salutatory names for God are decidedly feminist, as are prayers for women’s ordination and one “for when gender boxes are too small.” (This little book has become my go-to gift for baptisms, confirmations, and pretty much any gift-giving situation that involves a girl or young woman.)
I met Evans when she was hired at the National Catholic Reporter as its social-media editor, a job she was well suited for given her personal social-media success (with more than seventeen thousand followers on Instagram). In 2022, when I was the paper’s executive editor, she became the culture and spirituality editor. (I am no longer her supervisor, and now consider her a fellow feminist traveler on the spiritual path, and a friend.)
Evans has introduced me to a new generation of Catholic mom bloggers—all of them young women who are progressive and feminist, yet deeply spiritual, religious, and Catholic. Unlike their Boomer and Gen X predecessors, these progressive millennials are not afraid to pray at adoration one night and advocate for women’s ordination the next day. They also have spent much of their adult lives online and traverse easily between pop culture and spirituality. Did I mention that Evans is planning a Taylor Swift–themed retreat?
Another of this new generation of Catholic mom bloggers is Cameron Bellm, a Seattle-based writer and mom of two who is working on her first book, The Sacrament of Paying Attention. She and I have met up twice, and she is the kind of person with whom a coffee date can turn into a sprawling afternoon of sharing and deep conversation.
Bellm is a powerful poet and devotional writer, whose “Prayer for a Pandemic” went viral in the early days of Covid. She describes herself as a “contemplative in action” and takes inspiration from Ignatian spirituality, Catholic social teaching, and holy witnesses, especially Óscar Romero. But a while ago, she removed the identifier “Catholic” from her Instagram profile to stave off the more-Catholic-than-the-pope crowd. “The Catholic pitchfork army is real,” she told me, “and I didn’t want to invite them to my door.” The internet is surely big enough for all kinds of Catholics, but these bold women threaten some folks.
As evidenced by the women I have highlighted here, it’s clear that the Catholic mom blogosphere suffers from the tendency to privilege white women, even among the feminist crowd. Some Catholic writers of color who draw on their experiences as mothers include Alessandra Harris, a novelist and author of the recent book, In the Shadow of Freedom: The Enduring Call for Racial Justice; Leticia Ochoa Adamas, author of Our Lady of Hot Messes; and Shannon Wimp Schmidt, coauthor of Fat Luther, Slim Pickin’s and co-host of the Plaid Skirts and Basic Black podcast. But there is much work to be done to lift up the voices of more diverse representatives of motherhood.
Mothering Spirit is another mom-blog site, but because Laura Fanucci founded it in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, she insisted that its collection of writers be both diverse and ecumenical. She also wanted a Catholic blog that provided more than self-help or decorating tips, a place where writers could wrestle with uncertainty, doubt, and some of the “shadow side” of parenting and faith. “We found a readership that was really hungry not just for the influencer side of Catholic or Christian motherhood, but a space to have honest storytelling that looks at the reality of where they encounter God,” she told me. “I wanted writers to feel the freedom to share their story in ways that didn’t need to be prettied up or edited to fit a particular theological vision.”
Fanucci is a Minnesota-based mom of five boys with a sharp wit and take-no-prisoners honesty. Her first book, Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting, was praised for its “refreshing honesty” and “real-world theology.” She and her husband wrote a book about grieving after miscarriage, and Fanucci has taken her Instagram followers along as she has survived breast cancer. Although Mothering Spirit has been on a bit of a hiatus during her cancer treatment, Fanucci hopes to reboot it this year.
These younger writers all claim motherhood as a significant part of their identity, but it alone does not define them. In fact, they likely would eschew the label “mom blogger,” since their writing covers a much broader array of topics. Their homes, while important, are not the main character (or even the main setting) of their life stories. They also have been more explicit about protecting their children from the limelight of parental blogging fame. The “mom blogger” label can also be career-limiting. As Evans told me, “If you want to be taken seriously, writing exclusively about motherhood is not the way to do it.”
There are also some Catholic mom bloggers who are hard to categorize as conservative or not. Today’s Catholic institutional spheres—publishers, conferences, dioceses, and other employers—demand a certain orthodoxy, so writers who want those invitations have to be careful about what they do and don’t say publicly. But some Catholic mom bloggers have had life experiences—a divorce or a foray into comedy—that have led them to soften previous black-and-white thinking. (This has also been true in the Evangelical mom-blogging community, as in the cases of Beth Moore and Jen Hatmaker.)
Evans, Bellm, Fanucci, and others came not too late for me, as I still have two teenagers in the house. But you don’t have to be a mother to appreciate their spiritual writing—or to be inspired that a new generation of young women are embracing the Church through a feminist lens, informed by their own unique experiences. At a time when the image of the Church is anything but feminist, this generation of women is providing an alternative to the “feminine genius” school of Catholic thought. While I’m old enough to be their mother, I continue to be inspired by these writers’ wisdom, deep faith, and creativity. Through them, I have connected with young women all over the country, and even the world, who are living their faith, feminism, and motherhood in brave, bold ways. I have finally found my online tribe.
Heidi Schlumpf is an award-winning journalist and cohost of The Francis Effect podcast. She spent sixteen years with the National Catholic Reporter as a columnist, correspondent and executive editor/vice president.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal.
