Cristina Cabrejas
Lisbon, Aug 5 (EFE).- Father Heriberto, a 34-year-old Mexican priest with 1.7 million followers on Tik-Tok, is hailed as a pop star by the young people who have come to Lisbon to participate in the Day Youth World Cup (WYD) and incidentally get to know the most famous Catholic “influencers” who are participating in their first world meeting.
The Martim Moniz square in Lisbon has become this WYD in the “Cristonautas Park” and on Friday night after the Stations of the Cross, thousands of young people attended the First World Meeting of Digital Evangelizers and Missionaries, or as everyone calls them, the catholic “influencers”
The atmosphere is that of any concert full of dedicated fans, although what this audience chants is the name of their favorite “influencer” and instead of an opening group, the person in charge of opening the show is the Honduran cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga with a blessing and the request that “mobiles be raised with the light on and hearts open”.
A young woman from Mexico explains, while attending the show on the front line, that she follows Veronica Brunkow on the networks because “she loves the testimonials”, while her friend prefers “Fray foto” because “every post that goes up motivates everyone the days”. “We prefer Catholic ‘influencers’ because they are not empty, the others are not from God’s world,” she says.
After taking photos and recording videos with his fans, Father Heriberto, who, in addition to his content with motivating messages, also publishes stories as a true photomodel, assures that “he felt the call to announce the Gospel on social networks” and that “God gave him over there”.
“I started with the pandemic, uploading my homilies and I saw that they had an impact and all this exploded. I saw that God was giving me a community and he was making me responsible for it,” he explains.
The priest assures that his “physical appearance helps” in the networks, but that he “is not to blame and that if God has given it to him” then “he will use it to communicate Christ to young people.”
Another of the Catholic stars of social networks has also arrived from Puerto Rico, the priest Rafael Capo, who has become famous for his passion for physical exercise and weights, as he assures that “caring for the body is part of the activity that accomplish all Christians” because it is necessary “to take care of mind, body and spirit”.
“I started posting content on social networks and I realized that what I was doing was evangelizing and promoting the joy of the gospel, but on the digital continent,” he explains as the American faithful ask him to take photos with him.
The Spanish priest Damián Montes, who was one of the contestants on the television contest “La voz” in 2015, where he rose to fame, already has 800,000 followers talking about music and religion. He explains that his message to young people through his networks is that “everyone can be part of the Church”, as Pope Francis said during this WYD.
He confesses that, “like everyone else”, he looks every day at how many “followers” he has gained or lost, because “it is an indicator of how the work is being done” and he stresses that also in a passage from the Gospel it was said that: “the fame of Jesus was growing”. “If the number of followers to do good grows, then great,” he says.
Pablo Saboya, an Argentine priest, with 35,000 followers, speaks thanks to social networks with people who have moved away from the Church or lost their faith and tries to “propose the gospel so that these people can fall in love with Jesus again.”
“It is a new language, in a new territory because if missionaries used to go to Asia to evangelize, now we have the digital continent,” explains Saboya, who also regrets that there are many “haters” in this world, but what is being tried “is that the message is propositive”.
The Spanish missionary Ester Palma, who has lived in South Korea for 17 years and who posts content on South Korean and Eastern culture to get closer to young people, comments that “the new generations are always with their phones in hand and it is not possible to take it off”, so the solution was to “get on the phone to talk to them”. EFE
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