The emergence of so-called Catholic influencers on social media has led a group of researchers in Brazil to ask if evangelization is even possible in digital environments. As they try to decipher some of the church’s challenges today, they believe that the demands of evangelization exceed the ambition and capacity of “influencing.” They conclude that many of the most popular Catholic personalities on social media in Brazil are not presenting a meaningful Gospel witness.
The Most Rev. Joaquim Giovani Mol Guimarães, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Belo Horizonte in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, gathered five writers into a research group to review contemporary Catholic social media influencers—one of the numerous research initiatives on digital culture launched recently by the church in Brazil. “There is often a malevolent manipulation and deformation of Christianity when ‘influencers’ are governed by the laws of the media market,” Bishop Mol told America.
In February, the five authors published a book with the results of their work, including case studies of online personalities who present themselves as Catholic influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X. The Brazilian researchers believe that it is important to clarify the difference between an “influencer” and a “digital evangelizer.”
“Many ‘influencers’ try to adapt [the religious message] to economic interests, through monetization and sponsors who end up interfering in the posted content,” Bishop Mol said. “As in the parable of the [weed] and the wheat, the digital phenomenon mixes positive and interesting aspects with highly negative ones. It has to be analyzed and understood with a critical vision,” he explained.
An author of many books in the fields of communication and theology, Moisés Sbardelotto, from the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos and professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, is convinced that efforts to become an influencer are often at odds with evangelization of digital environments.
“We can see many examples of counter-testimonies, or what Pope John Paul II called anti-evangelization, which is very serious,” said Dr. Sbardelotto, who was one of the researchers on the diocesan project. “This criticism is necessary so that those who want to dedicate themselves to digital evangelization can understand and review their own practices, rethink and discern their behaviors.
“Communication market standards define what a digital influencer is,” Dr. Sbardelotto said. “The digital evangelist, on the other hand, remains faithful to the Scriptures and, fundamentally, to the Gospel. They sustain the teachings of the church, in communion with the pope and the local bishops. Their way of acting must be centered on the person of Jesus.”
“This has to be reflected in their own lives and in the way they present the person of Christ to others,” he said.
Another one of the contributors to the project, Alzirinha Souza, is coordinator of the Brazil Ecclesial Observatory. She carefully studied five Catholic influencers, including four priests and one layperson. She noted that Catholic influencers are on social media with different goals: Some represent the ideas and interests of a specific religious organization, and others are online to share their individual views and outlook on faith.
One of the influencers she analyzes is the Rev. Patrick Fernandes, a priest from Parauapebas, in the northern state of Pará, who currently has more than 6 million followers on his Instagram account. He uses irreverent humor to answer the questions of his followers, often commenting on their love and sexual lives or making jokes about people’s appearances, especially women. He also gives self-help advice on how to improve quality of life, including fitness recommendations.
Another priest she analyzed is the Rev. Fábio de Melo, who once was a member of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Dehonians) but later was incardinated in the Diocese of Taubaté, in the state of São Paulo. Father Melo is also a singer and considered a national television celebrity.
On his social media accounts he talks mostly about himself, his personal life, publications and concerts, but he also dedicates a good part of his posts to sharing funny videos and messages with inspirational content or advice like: “Some people pass through our lives just to remind us what not to be like.”
“In 90 percent of the posts these two priests are representing themselves as individuals, not an institution or an idea,” Dr. Souza said.
She also reviewed the social media presence of the Rev. Paulo Ricardo, a priest of the Archdiocese of Cuiabá, in the central state of Mato Grosso, and a layman, Bernardo Küster, who presents himself on YouTube as “Catholic, journalist and professor to more than [10,000] students in courses upholding the faith, in person and online.”
Both of them adopt a predominantly doctrinal and political approach to Catholic issues. They sell dozens of courses with this type of content. They also make a lot of free content available, while monetizing their social media in a professional way.
“They are situated on the political far right and make a sociopolitical representation on their social media accounts,” Dr. Souza said. “Both eventually align themselves with political values that do not converge with Christian values. They have a discourse critical of the bishops’ conference and a subliminal discourse critical of Pope Francis.”
Both of these social media personalities are open supporters of Brazil’s embattled former president Jair Bolsonaro, who governed the country from 2019 through the end of 2022. Brazil is among the nations where right-wing ideas and policies have become more popular and more radical in recent years, culminating in the Bolsonaro presidency. Mr. Bolsonaro’s political base is concentrated among conservative evangelicals and Catholics—as well as most of the military, the agricultural sector and right-wing businessmen and families.
Social media has played a decisive role in the phenomenon of the populist radicalization of political and religious discourse in Brazil. In this context, Dr. Souza said, big Catholic influencers are usually able to make their messages reverberate—or go viral—as they begin to be shared among many other smaller influencers.
Socially conservative and populist Catholic influencers become sources for political groups to legitimize their own views, often discussing issues that would be more appropriate for experts or church authorities to comment on, she said. They behave as if they had “an ecclesiastical authority that they have given themselves.”
“They set themselves up as supra diocesan, supra ecclesial,” Dr. Souza said. “They speak for themselves, creating an ecclesial bubble and almost a parallel version of church teaching.” Social media has become a mainstream channel for the dissemination of religious messages and practices, she said, but often its “great reach is used for a discourse disconnected from the guidelines of the universal church, the pope and the local Brazilian church, replacing the authority of bishops’ conference.”
Many of these influencers, Dr. Souza said, summarize life in the church merely as adopting and following a set of laws or norms. “Today, we often see people on digital networks dictating rules, telling others how they should behave, how they should act in celebrations. It is a Christianity of norms, not of meaning, as if to be a follower of Jesus it was enough to follow a code of norms, memorize the Bible and the Catechism,” she said.
The Rev. Júlio Lancellotti is a diocesan priest who leads a social project for the homeless through his parish in the city of São Paulo. Dr. Souza views his social media presence more positively. “This is a pastor who uses social media to defend a cause on which he has worked for over 20 years,” she said, adding that he also uses his platform politically in criticisms of the government. According to her review of his online presence, Father Lancellotti acts in favor of a group of marginalized people and never publicly contradicts other church authorities.
“There are church people doing good work on social media, looking for language to evangelize and speak to their audience, but they are clearly a…minority,” she said. “We have a range of people who speak in the name of the church who are completely disconnected from the real demands of the people, be they moral, social or existential.”
Dr. Sbardelotto and Dr. Souza agree that the only way to counter the excessive impact that influencers have on the life of the church today is to promote more critical thinking among the Catholic faithful. The people of God must be able to recognize attempts to manipulate the faith for political and economic ends, they said.
They need to be able to “discern well the actions of these people on the web so that we can separate the ‘evangelizers’ from those who are just ‘influencers,’” said Dr. Sbardelotto.
The contribution that the church can make in this field involves training those who work in these areas, but also those who are the target audience of the influencers’ messages, said Dr. Souza. “We need to have more and more trained evangelizing agents, prepared to understand not only digital technology, but the message that they mean to communicate. Finding this path is a challenge.”
Dr. Sbardelotto notes that digital influencers are changing the exercise of contemporary religions across the board. Church leaders “no longer have control over the sacred as before” even as they are also trying to have a “digital face.”
The church “finds herself in the midst of an effervescence of new languages, practices and communication technologies” that may lead to many opportunities for evangelization and mission. The church’s evangelizers should make the effort to understand this new digital frontier, he said.
