By: A perplexed (ex) Catholic
Last Sunday, September 7, the Church canonized Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who died 20 years ago at the age of 15. He is promoted as a young saint in sneakers, t-shirts, who played video games. A “saint in jeans,” an everyday saint, one like any of us could become, in an ordinary way. And I say ordinary as something opposed to the extraordinary nature of sanctity, by the grace of God.
But since no one laughs at God, behind the simplistic caricature emerges the reality of this holy boy’s life. A child who, from the moment he received his First Communion, attended Mass every day (according to the Ambrosian rite), prayed the rosary daily, adored the Most Blessed Sacrament daily, created a website where he collected Eucharistic miracles, and was a true apostle of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. With his fervor, he converted his mother to the Catholic faith, a Hindu caregiver he had in his childhood, and many other people. There are more and more testimonies emerging that question that image of his body on display in a hoodie and sneakers, since, apparently, his attire for attending Mass was worthy of such an occasion.
What better portrait of this young saint than the lament of the modernist professor Andrea Grillo, ideologue of the liturgical persecution of the traditional, about his conception of the Eucharist? Grillo, as an article on this portal points out, “is scandalized that Carlo did not develop a ‘modern Eucharistic theology’ and accuses him of an obsession with what is not essential (‘lo inessenziale’) because he focused on Eucharistic miracles.” What amounts to a very young Catholic with a deep understanding of the real presence of the living Christ in the Eucharist, one of the main stumbling blocks of the current ecumenist liturgism. With enemies like these of the new saint, we can be more certain of his sanctity.
However, this deepening will not reach all areas and we can suspect that, in most parishes where an image of Saint Carlo Acutis is installed, the most superficial traits of him will be highlighted: that he played video games, was a normal young man, and has become a saint, just like that, recording with his video camera, traveling. Therefore, we can all be saints like that. Part of this banalizing instrumentalization of Carlo Acutis’s sanctity is the qualifier of “God’s influencer,” in the same way that the late Pope Francis addressed the Most Holy Virgin Mary.
Very different this true “God’s influencer” from the banality and superficiality of most of the so-called “Catholic influencers” or “digital evangelizers” from our country who have been flooding social networks for some time and dominating diocesan and parish events, turned into frivolous musical spectacles, although there is an agenda in the Church that wants to pass Acutis off as one of them. About these “influencers,” I would like to emphasize three specific aspects: 1) their formation in the Catholic faith, doctrine, and morals; 2) the fact that they are full-time, professional influencers who earn their bread ¿evangelizing?, without other paid jobs; and 3) the bishops’ abdication of duties, specifically the important mission of teaching, by putting “pastoral care” and the formation of young people in the hands of certain individuals.
Romano Amerio already noted in Iota Unum, his systematic study of the “variations of the Church in the 20th century,” written in 1985, a very important and pertinent issue regarding the topic we are addressing: the “variation in the postconciliar Church regarding youth,” which in the 21st century we can already see has become hypertrophic and toxic.
In Chapter VIII of his book, Amerio analyzes the “novel consideration of youth,” and reviews how the traditional conception in philosophy, morals, art, and common sense ab antiquo until our times considered youth as an age of natural imperfection and moral imperfection. An age of weak reason, not yet consolidated; a minority that requires a tutor, a counselor, and a teacher. This idea was placed, Amerio indicates, as the foundation of Catholic pedagogy by all the great educators, from Saint Benedict of Nursia to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, from Saint Joseph Calasanz to Saint John Baptist de La Salle or Saint John Bosco.
“The Church’s conduct toward youth – Amerio continues – cannot therefore disregard the opposition between the following correlative elements: the imperfect before the perfect (relatively speaking, of course), and the one who does not know and therefore learns, before the one who knows (relatively speaking, of course). The difference between things cannot be set aside and treat young people as mature, the proficient as perfect, the minors as adults, and, in the final analysis, the dependent as independent.”
“Life is difficult, serious – Amerio states –; man is a weak nature, in combat with his finitude; man is corrupted and tends toward evil. Man should not ‘realize’ himself, but realize the values for which he has been created and which require his transformation.” In contrast to this traditional conception of youth in the Church and Western society, Romano Amerio notes how “today life is presented to young people in a non-realistic way, as joy, substituting the joy of hope that serenely calms the spirit in via for the full joy that only quenches it in termino. The harshness of human living is denied or disguised, described in times past as a valley of tears in the most frequent prayers. And with that change, Amerio indicates, “happiness is presented as the proper state of man. Adults have abandoned the exercise of authority in order to please young people, because they believe they cannot be loved if they do not behave gently and do not grant them their whims.”
Romano Amerio considers paradigmatic in his work the speech of April 1971 by Paul VI to a group of hippies gathered in Rome to demonstrate for peace, in which the pope points out the “values” of youth: spontaneity, “the liberation from certain formal and conventional bonds,” the “impulse to live and interpret their own era.” A speech without any religious explication that, along with his speech of January 3, 1972, although they are opinions and not magisterium, show themselves antithetical to the semiology of traditional Catholic youth, describing as positive qualities the natural disinterest in the past, the easy critical temperament, and intuitive foresight. Paul VI concludes by proclaiming that “you can be at the prophetic vanguard of the joint cause of justice and peace, because you, more than others, have the sense of justice” and all (the non-young) are in your favor.” It is not difficult, Amerio comments, to discover in Paul VI’s juvenilizing speech to the City of Boys a singular inversion of natures, whereby the one who should guide is guided and the immature is an example for the mature. The attribution of an innate sense of justice has no foundation whatsoever in previous Catholic semiology.
Romano Amerio also demonstrates how “the cult of Hebe is not only something proper to the pope, but is widespread in all orders of the Church,” and cites as an example a document from the Swiss Episcopal Conference for the national holiday of 1969, where it can be read that “youth protest carries with it values of authenticity, availability, respect for man, rejection of mediocrity, renunciation of oppression; values that, well considered, are found in the Gospel.”
It might be thought that the Catholic hierarchy fell into this exaltation of youth dragged by the current of the late 1960s. However, it has continued in this approach, which has become completely hypertrophic. The “adults” and “teachers,” who are the pastors of the Church, have progressively and currently in a very clear way abdicated their mission of teaching into the hands of young people whose formation they have not previously taken care of, putting souls at risk.
This is the phenomenon we mentioned above of Catholic influencers and the format of ecclesial events turned into spectacles of Protestantizing aesthetics and dynamics that the Church in Spain seems to have institutionalized, a specific case to which I am going to refer.
Here, in Spain, I believe that the phenomenon of digital influencers is reaching another level, which is getting worse: young people without solid formation who, due to their fame gained on social networks, are generating new ecclesial movements of dubious orthodoxy, with the blessing of the hierarchy. The phenomenon seemed innocuous at first, even positive: the great capacity of social networks, due to their reach and use among young people, to cast the nets, to make the Gospel of Christ present in the digital world. In this way, some Catholic influencers began – I imagine and hope – with the illusion of sharing the discovery of Jesus Christ and the change that it meant in their lives. Instagram and TikTok accounts, especially, based on their experiential testimonies, rather than any kind of regulated formation, and attractive topics for young people: conversion, dating… and little more, if we look closely.
But, depending on their “success” in quantitative follow-up terms, their paths diversified: some Catholic influencers hired, like any pagan influencer, representation agencies that managed their accounts more professionally and put them in contact with brands, to be able to advertise or do giveaways, and generate extra income and/or payments in kind. Catholic influencers, moreover, have evolved at the frantic pace of the world, not at the more prudent pace that characterizes the Church. In a very short time, the new Catholic influencers, genuine professionals from a very young age, who should be disciples, have become teachers: pilgrimages guided by influencers, talks in parishes and various diocesan events, clothing brands, retreats. Everything that happens in an influencer’s life is “content”: their weddings and those of their friends, their vacations, their studies; and their income through invitations to talks and events and various collaborations with brands to earn commissions. Personally, I see little difference between most so-called Catholic influencers and worldly influencers, and perhaps more honesty in the latter, who do not need to use God as an excuse to live off showing on networks everything they do.
It disturbs me that some of these influencers, who charge for teaching how to pray, write books in their twenties that pretend to influence many, are generating incipient lay ecclesial movements, increasingly distant from the apostolic Catholic faith and more similar to evangelical sects, without the presence of priests to guide the group’s development. The fact is that being a Catholic influencer in Spain has become for a few a wonderful modus vivendi (pampered guests up and down) and a business.
But what seems important to mention, due to its gravity, is that from the innocent practice of calling parishes and events to Catholic influencers from all over Spain, because the young audience knows them and guarantees attendance, they have recently moved to reconverting into “digital evangelizers” and the bishops, starting with the Madrid meteorite, now officially count on them to delegate their teaching mission. This is very serious. It may be sympathetic that a first-time Catholic mom tells her experience and even writes a book and Albada publishes it, Rialp’s white label that publishes books by Catholic influencers prologued and presented by other Catholic influencers. All of them, neoconservatives; liberals. It may be edifying to listen to a Catholic engaged couple who live chastity and a mature dentist tell the keys to a healthy marriage. BUT what is the doctrinal and moral formation of these influencers and what is their authority over us?
The problem arises when a bishop has granted someone a sort of official digital evangelizer ID IN THE NAME OF THE CHURCH. First, I return to the topic of formation: is solid formation provided before sending them to preach in the digital world, as Saint Dominic of Guzmán did with his friars? A lot is at stake. It is the proclamation of the Truth. Or is it not checked what they teach, as long as they have thousands of followers and gather crowds? Or, even worse, are they mere loudspeakers, with thousands of followers on their social media accounts, of the neolanguage and neocontent of the neo church: migrants, ecology, synodality, and little more? And zero criticism, zero mention, of the doctrinal and moral aberrations that during Francis’s pontificate have been launched from Rome; zero criticism of the bishops’ silences on issues like abortion or their wrong positions on massive illegal Muslim immigration. Catholic influencers need to be on good terms with the hierarchy and stay aside on any thorny issue, something that is better understood when contemplating the possibility that they are being paid for doing a job for the bishops, who dictate the message they must replicate.
In recent days, I have been shocked by statements from influencers with tens of thousands of followers celebrating the theological formation of the laity to be able to offer a more “experiential” and less rigid theological teaching, or celebrating the current ecclesial spring (sic), alive and joyful, against the rigidity of the past, a heavier faith, “of sin, fear, and tradition.” That’s where we’re headed: to ¿Catholic? tele-preachers, each with their version and their movement – growing circle of influence; each time, by the way, with less presence of priests among a group of recently converted young people who go freelance in their formation and preaching.
Priests are not spared from the temptation to want to be influencers either, as the portal La nuova bussola quotidiana recently mentioned: “For every priest who abandons Peter’s barque in the midst of the storm, there are others who, like on the Titanic, sing and dance, perfectly comfortable in the current situation.” And this reflection, which La Nuova Bussola refers to priest influencers, can also apply to laity who in the midst of these choppy waters dedicate themselves to fishing for their fame and income.
It is at stake to make the little ones lose their faith, to confuse them. It is also at stake that the Lord will demand an account from the bishops of having fulfilled or not their fundamental mission of teaching. And it is at stake the conscience of each one to dedicate themselves to the enormous responsibility of influencing others, even under the qualifier of Catholic; if it moves them evangelizing zeal or ego and the search for fame and an easy life at the expense of their followers, only God can see and judge that.