Thou Shalt Not Scroll Past a Hot Priest
From handsome priests to Vatican influencer summits, the Catholic Church looks to a new generation of charismatic clerics to halt its decline. But can viral aesthetics translate into lasting credibility?
The host of “The Bible in a Year,” Apple’s number one podcast of 2021, is a Catholic priest named Mike Schmitz, who has a great speaking voice, contagious enthusiasm, and a disarming “aw shucks” demeanor. He is also—and this is relevant for reasons I’m about to go into—fairly easy on the eyes. Think Jon Hamm in a Roman collar and you’ll start to get the idea.
The concept of “Father What-a-Waste” certainly isn’t new. But if you fit a certain profile (elder millennial or younger, practicing Catholic, female—not that I’d know), you may have encountered the phenomenon of the “hot priest” on social media. Perhaps one of the Catholic influencers you follow hyped up his wisdom and scriptural insight in a post. Maybe your Instagram algorithm recommended his weight-lifting content. Or maybe your friends sent you an edited compilation of hot priests on Instagram, set to the sultry melodies of “Like a Prayer” and originally created by Eroticco Magazine. The trend had been simmering for a while when the New York Post presented the Vatican as holding a convention for “hot priest” influencers this past July. With that headline, the trend seemed poised on a knife’s edge between going mainstream and jumping the shark (you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor). But more importantly, the sudden popularity of the hot social media priest is perhaps an early indicator that Catholicism is on its way to denominational monopoly, even despite its ongoing challenges.
Some quick history first.
Most people have encountered the “cool youth pastor” trope. He’s a try-hard, as well as tragically hip and painfully earnest. He is either pushing 30 or rapidly approaching the wrong side of it, and he thinks you should know that “JC was the OG sigma who didn’t have to fw aura farming.”
Whence the provenance of the “hot priest,” though? As with many social media trends, it’s hard to be sure, but it may have initially risen to prominence in the “twenty-teens” thanks to fans of the British series Fleabag. They christened the titular Fleabag’s object of desire, an attractive Catholic priest, literally “Hot Priest.” Famously, Roman Catholic priests are avowedly celibate, so the script mined the two characters’ complicated relationship for dramatic and sexual tension. His appeal was fairly straightforward. Hot Priest represented an archetype: the handsome man of principle who wrestles privately with his inadmissible passion for the heroine. In internet parlance, when considered from the standpoint of the Western literary canon—Pride and Prejudice, the Brontës, Twilight—struggling manfully with this particular ethical dilemma is among the sluttiest things a man can do.
Now that we’ve explained the “why” of the hot priest (women can project themselves onto a forbidden romance with an attractive man who is willing to give up everything he values to be with them), we may examine the “why now?” Why indeed, particularly post-Me Too, and as the Catholic Church continues to deal with the fallout from its own sexual abuse scandal? The clue lies in the New York Post headline I mentioned above. “Vatican to host ‘hot priests’ influencers,” it read, “who spread word of God to younger faithful as numbers slump.” The slump is the thing.
While “hot priests” naturally drew the most clicks, the Vatican’s weekend-long event hosted many other kinds of Catholic influencers. The summit, which was called the Jubilee for Digital Missionaries and Influencers, also included young people, married women who promote modest traditional dress and, yes, hunky, guitar-playing celibate clerics. The event is part of a broader ongoing effort from the church to combat its steadily declining numbers. According to Pew Research’s most recent count, the cradle-Catholics-heading-for-the-exits-to-convert ratio is about 8 to 1. Amid a wave of scandals, the church seems to be calling in a battalion of young, online reinforcements in an attempt to help turn the tide.
What is notable about this slump, however, is that it exists parallel to another trend in American religion: the even stronger decline of Protestantism. The United States may not be majority Catholic, and the Catholics have a slew of internal challenges, but Catholicism is now larger than any single Protestant denomination in the country. Moreover, there are signs that within Protestantism, denominational affiliation is also weakening.
The mainline churches—Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians—used to be the churches of the WASP establishment. Today, they are all in steep membership declines of their own. As a 2022 Christianity Today article put it, “If ‘nondenominational’ were a denomination, it would be the largest Protestant one, comprising 13 percent” of U.S. churchgoers. Many have ambiguous names that could just as easily belong to Pilates studios as churches, like “Elevate” or “Transformation.” They are led by trendy pastors with slick online branding. In trying to present a nonthreatening face to the “nones” (religiously unaffiliated people) who now comprise roughly one-third of American adults, they may have succeeded too well in looking like everyone else. Meanwhile, with its “smells and bells” and readily identifiable clergy, the Catholic Church is recognizably, well, religious. For that reason alone, Catholicism may simply be becoming the default shorthand for “organized religion.”
Catholicism is the moment, but is the Church meeting that moment?
There is something else at work too. A denomination that was once so socially unacceptable that it had to establish its own parallel school system might soon be, as Jacob Adams recently speculated in The Daily Signal, the new mainline. “I had no idea about how preeminent Catholic para institutions had become in the nation’s capital,” Adams wrote. “When you stroll around the Capitol building, it’s not uncommon to see priests in white robes walking about.”
Look at our own recent history. Our second Catholic president, an octogenarian cradle Catholic, was immediately followed by a millennial Catholic vice president, a convert. It’s almost a perfect distillation of Catholicism’s cultural trajectory. In the 1960s, JFK had to make a public statement that he wouldn’t take orders from the Pope. Two years into the Biden administration, Julia Yost was writing for The New York Times’ opinion page that amid a wave of Gen Z converts, New York’s hottest club was the Catholic Church. This was around the same time J.D. Vance, who converted in 2019, was establishing himself in American politics. By 2022, Catholicism wasn’t just kind of cool, it was also becoming kind of elite.
According to Adams, when the College of Cardinals elected the first American pope earlier this year, it signaled the “capstone to the long maturation of the Catholic faith in America.” The “Moral Majority” used to be the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, whose cultural dominance gave birth to the “cool youth pastor.” But if Adams is right, then the “hot priest” is simply the cultural successor of the “edgy 2000s youth pastor.” In the age of the social media influencer, the hip young guy in jeans and a structured hat now looks too much like all the other secular content makers trying to sell you something. Instead of having an aesthetic that mimics what’s already popular, Rome has an undeniable aura.
So how does the Church reconcile these two competing truths: its growing popularity as a cultural force in modern America, particularly among a new Gen Z cohort, and its continued dwindling numbers?
Perhaps the most constructive thing that Church leadership could do from an evangelization standpoint is to realize they don’t need to work quite so hard and to get out of their own way. From afar, the Vatican’s recent influencer jubilee seemed very “How do you do, fellow kids?” The Vatican brought out the relics of the soon-to-be-canonized Carlo Acutis, the first millennial saint who—the hagiographies take care to remind us—played video games and wore Adidas. Vatican officials’ remarks to those present included cringe references to the Virgin Mary as “God’s influencer” and to the Church as the original social network, which is all the same kind of cool youth-pastor-coded language that is damaging Protestantism’s current cultural cachet.
In contrast, Pope Leo XIV largely managed to avoid the cool trap in his remarks to the assembled Catholic content creators. He noted that their job was “to ensure that this culture remains human”—in other words, to privilege people over the algorithm. But he might have done better to recycle an earlier homily from the start of his pontificate. It was a charge to priests to lead lives that are “transparent, visible, credible!” Priests, whether they’re hot or not, “live among the people of God so that [they] may stand before them with a credible witness.”
By those metrics, with or without a social media presence, priests are and always have been influencers. Catholicism is the moment, but is the Church meeting that moment? Conclave fan accounts may be doing numbers, and the girlies may be wearing veils to mass and having a chaste convent summer. But this influx of buzzworthy Zoomers has still done little to compensate for the church’s massive losses—and neither have the hot priests of Instagram.
That’s because the challenge for these hot priests, and more broadly for the Catholic Church in 2025, is not visibility. They’ve got their social media standing on lock. But as we all know by now, what we see on Instagram doesn’t always reflect tangible reality and also carries a high potential to crumble at a moment’s notice. We’ve all heard the stories, by now as formulaic as those of the televangelists of yore, of the influencers who fall from grace with a few DMs.
Rather, they face an ongoing challenge of transparency and credibility. Will their recent gains help build a stronger foundation for an institution that stands on shaky ground? Or will the newcomers come to reject the vibes and aesthetics like any other passing trend—or, worse, with the next public scandal?
The new Pope Leo seems particularly concerned with the restoration of credibility to the church. Especially in his native country, where religious institutions do not enjoy high levels of public trust, becoming the establishment denomination in this day and age is a daunting task. American Catholics tend to be especially mistrustful of organized religion, and the past few decades haven’t helped. When it comes to restoring that trust, it remains to be seen whether the so-called digital missionaries—be they lay or ordained, hot or mid—are a help or a hindrance.
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