@soeur.albertine Sister Albertine
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 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".
Long wary of social media, the Catholic Church now sees it as a vital tool to spread the faith amid dwindling church attendance. For Sister Albertine, this is the ideal "missionary terrain". 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. She said it was highly symbolic that the Vatican organised the event bringing together its Instagramming-disciples. "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.
The influencer summit was held as part of the Vatican's "Jubilee of Youth", as young believers flooded Rome this week.
'The great influencer is God'
Sister Albertine has 320,000 followers on Instagram and some of her TikTok videos get more than a million views. She shares a mix of prayers with episodes from daily religious life, often from French abbeys. "You feel alone, and I suggest that we can pray together," she said in one video, crossing herself. 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. "You are not only influencers, but you are also missionaries," influential Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle – one of the few Vatican officials active on social media - told those attending mass. The "great influencer is God", he added. 'Jesus not a digital programme' But Cardinal Tagle also warned that "Jesus is not a voice generated by a digital programme".
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". "It is not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter between hearts," said the American pope.