{"id":3768,"date":"2025-07-31T05:45:42","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T05:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/vatican-embraces-social-media-digital-missionaries\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T05:45:42","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T05:45:42","slug":"vatican-embraces-social-media-digital-missionaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/vatican-embraces-social-media-digital-missionaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Vatican embraces social media ‘digital missionaries’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sister Albertine, a youthful French Catholic nun, stood outside the Vatican, phone in hand, ready to shoot more videos for her hundreds of thousands of followers online.<\/p>\n

The 29-year-old nun, whose secular name is Albertine Debacker, is one of hundreds of Catholic influencers in Rome for a Vatican-organised social media summit this week.<\/p>\n

The Vatican calls them “digital missionaries” and — in an unprecedented move for the centuries-old institution — Pope Leo XIV led a mass dedicated to them at St Peter’s Basilica, calling on them to create content for those who “need to know the Lord”.<\/p>\n

Long wary of social media, the Catholic Church now sees it as a vital tool to spread the faith amid dwindling church attendance.<\/p>\n

For Sister Albertine, this is the ideal “missionary terrain”.<\/p>\n

Inside the Baroque basilica, she was one of a swarm of religious influencers who surrounded the new pope, live streaming the meeting on their smartphones within one of Christianity’s most sacred spots.<\/p>\n

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She said it was highly symbolic that the Vatican organised the event bringing together its Instagramming-disciples.<\/p>\n

“It tells us: ‘it’s important, go for it, we’re with you and we’ll search together how we can take this new evangelisation forward,” she told AFP.<\/p>\n

The influencer summit was held as part of the Vatican’s “Jubilee of Youth”, as young believers flooded Rome this week.<\/p>\n

‘The great influencer is God’<\/h2>\n

Sister Albertine has 320,000 followers on Instagram and some of her TikTok videos get more than a million views.<\/p>\n

She shares a mix of prayers with episodes from daily religious life, often from French abbeys.<\/p>\n

“You feel alone and I suggest that we can pray together,” she said in one video, crossing herself.<\/p>\n

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But, as religious content spreads online in the social media and AI era, one of the reasons behind the Vatican’s summit was for it to express its position on the trend.<\/p>\n

“You are not only influencers, you are missionaries,” influential Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle — one of the few Vatican officials active on social media – told those attending mass.<\/p>\n

The “great influencer is God”, he added.<\/p>\n

Jesus not a digital programme<\/h2>\n

But Tagle also warned that “Jesus is not a voice generated by a digital programme”.<\/p>\n

Pope Leo called on his online followers to strike a balance at a time when society is “hyperconnected” and “bombarded with images, sometimes false or distorted”.<\/p>\n

“It is not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter between hearts,” said the American pope, 69.<\/p>\n

It is this balance that has been hard to strike, with some Catholic clerics themselves embracing a social media presence.<\/p>\n

Father Giuseppe Fusari does not look like a regular priest: wearing tight shirts exposing his arm tattoos.<\/p>\n

To his 63,000 followers on Instagram, he mixes content about Italian church architecture and preaching.<\/p>\n

Important we’re online, too<\/h2>\n

Fusari told AFP there is no reason Catholic clerics should not embrace the world of online videos.<\/p>\n

“Everyone uses social media, so it’s important that we’re there too,” said Fusari, who came to Rome for the influencer event from the northern city of Brescia.<\/p>\n

Fusari said his goal was to reach as many people as possible online, sharing the “word of God” with them.<\/p>\n

This also takes the form of sharing videos of his chihuahua eating spaghetti.<\/p>\n

But priests and nuns are not the only ones trying to attract people to the Church online, with regular believers spreading the faith too.<\/p>\n

Francesca Parisi, a 31-year-old Italian teacher, joined the Catholic Church later in life.<\/p>\n

She now has some 20,000 followers on TikTok, where she tries to make the Catholic faith look trendy.<\/p>\n

Her target audience? People who have “drifted away” from the church.<\/p>\n

It’s possible, she said, to lure them back through their smartphones.<\/p>\n

“If God did it with me, rest assured, he can also do it with you.”<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t© 2025 AFP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

<\/sub><\/p>\n

Vatican embraces social media ‘digital missionaries’<\/div>\n

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Sister Albertine, a youthful French Catholic nun, stood outside the Vatican, phone in hand, ready to shoot more videos for her hundreds of thousands of followers online. The 29-year-old nun, whose secular name is Albertine Debacker, is one of hundreds of Catholic influencers in Rome for a Vatican-organised social media summit this week. The Vatican…<\/p>\n

Read More “Vatican embraces social media ‘digital missionaries’”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3769,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}