How the internet is saving the Catholic Church from self-destruction

Gavin Ashenden• January 23, 2025

One of the most extraordinary phenoma of the last ten years has been the explosive growth of Catholic spirituality on the Internet in the form of podcasts and other broadcasts.

Thomas Casemore recently described the astonishing growth of religious podcasts in general and Catholic ones in particular in this magazine.

Most people won’t be aware of the extraordinary success that Fr. Mike Schmidt had when, in 2021, he provided the opportunity to read the Bible in a year via his “Ascension” app. It has since been downloaded over 700 million times. Its companion app, the Rosary in a year, achieved a million downloads within four days of its launch on January 1 2025.

Influential voices have begun to point the public’s attention to the Church in the quest for meaning and morals.

Authors like Tom Holland (as Casemore suggested) have made a fresh case for the argument that the Catholic faith provides the foundations for the values of our civilisation.  

Such authors are trying to persuade the religiously non-aligned citizens of the West that the aspects of civic freedom they most value are provided by the faith. This ought to cause them to re-think their visceral reflex repudiation of Christianity.  They act as a kind of antidote to the loudest and most energetic atheist apologists who have been urging this repudiation on them.

Equally importantly, writers like Rod Dreher are combating the politicisation of faith. In his new book “Living in Wonder”, Dreher provides the evidence that the supernatural is the antidote to the vacant materialistic meaning-light pragmatism of Enlightenment culture.

New initiatives are breaking fresh internet ground regularly. 

One of Donald Trump’s former speech writers, Joshua Charles, has launched “Eternal Christendom” with the aim of giving a new generation access to the Great Tradition, and in particular to recorded and visual presentations of the Church Fathers. 

And (declaring an interest), YouTube channels like “Catholic Unscripted” (which wearing a different hat, I play a small part in),   are growing rapidly, pulling in audiences in increasing numbers who are looking for people who speak to them as they try to navigate the rapids of an exploration for faith or the rediscovery of faith, in the aftermath of the post-modern and post-truth secular brutalism of the least few decades.

Part of the appetite for Catholic podcasting however derives from a climate of fear that has arisen in the Church over the last decade.

The Catholic Herald, only a few days ago, documented the latest episcopal casualty, involving the Bishop of Frejus-Toulon, who was asked for his resignation at the request of the pope.

A priest who felt he had to speak under the conditions of anonymity commented, “Bishop Rey liked to compare his diocese to a garden where all flowers flourish. In my opinion, Bishop Rey is being penalised for having done something; some of the things [he did] I wouldn’t want a bishop to do myself; some of them I would. But he is being penalised for having done something when the rest of them have become administrative technocrats who administer decline.

“He has been quite successful in many ways, and when things have gone wrong, he has never swept anything under the carpet. There has never been a question of him hiding abuse by clergy. He always dealt with these things very strictly.”

Bishop Rey offered his resignation without any other comment than this: “In the face of misunderstandings, pressure, and polemics that are always harmful to the unity of the Church, the ultimate criterion of discernment for me remains obedience to the Successor of Peter.”

The removal of bishops has been restricted to those of a conservative outlook. 

Bishop Strickland was asked for his resignation 18 months ago. The perception has grown up that if both bishops and priests, particularly if they are non-progressive on matters of faith and sexuality, would be safer and less vulnerable if they keep a discreet silence.

Archbishop Sheen foresaw something like this taking place and invoked the laity for the protection of the Church. 

“You have the minds, the eyes and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that the priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and the religious act like religious.”

In fact, voices from the laity have set out to do just that in the world of podcast.

Henry Weston from Life Site News has an audience of 69,000; Trent Horne (the Council of Trent) has 195,000; Matt Fradd, an outspoken Australian who has relocated to the USA, runs “Pints with Aquinas” and has an audience of 644,000. Bishop Barron has over 500,000 signed up to receive his daily email reflections, while Dr Taylor Marshall, a former Episcopalian clergyman turned Catholic author and commentator, has an audience of 1.2 million.

One could perhaps make an argument that if the Catholic Church wanted to practice a more diverse and inclusive conversation with itself, including the laity, then the process of Synodality is already happening online in the form of the Catholic podcasting world. Men and women, lay and clerical, conservative and progressive, have their audiences, which are growing.

There is something for almost every Catholic taste, from evangelisation and apologetics through to the Daily Office, as well as, of course, traditional Catholic journalism, such as that offered by the Catholic Herald.

When Mao Tse Tung recommended allowing a thousand flowers to bloom, little did he know that he would also be describing the outburst of Catholic spirituality on the internet. 

(Bishop Barron is famous for his online ministry | Getty)