A growing number of young adults are encountering Christianity not in parish halls or through inherited tradition, but through Instagram reels, TikTok clips, YouTube testimonies, Catholic influencers and podcast algorithms. While the medium may feel modern, the Church’s instinct to meet people where they are is anything but.

The Catholic tradition has long recognised the potential of media as a tool for evangelisation. Pope Paul VI warned that the Church would be ‘guilty before the Lord’ if she failed to use the communications tools available to proclaim the Gospel; Pope John Paul II later described communication as the ‘first Areopagus of the modern age’, a new public square capable of uniting ‘humanity and turning it into what is known as a “global village”’; and Pope Benedict XVI reflected that new technologies allow people to meet ‘beyond the confines of space’, thereby making God ‘concretely present in today’s world’. He urged priests and evangelists to stand at the ‘crossroads of the new digital highways’, where so many now search for purpose, identity and meaning.