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
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’ –<\/p>\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
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’ –<\/p>\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’ –<\/p>\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
mdb-oc\/ams\/jj\/tc<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"jnews_post_split":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[243,717,127,1033,775],"class_list":["post-4743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-media","tag-pope","tag-religion","tag-social","tag-vatican"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}