“The total body of Christians on earth in 1054 AD at the time of the Great Schism between Byzantium and Rome was about eighty million. The number of Christians today, just Christians, is more than two billion.”
Michael Novak wrote that in No One Sees God, and the sentence deserves a second reading. From eighty million to two billion, getting closer to three billion actually… No venture capitalist would turn down those numbers.
Yet the institution behind much of that growth, the Catholic Church, is rarely discussed alongside innovation. Silicon Valley has its disruption; Rome, apparently, has its traditions. The two are supposed to occupy separate planets. But perhaps the divide is not so clear. Consider what has happened in the past five years alone.
A Priest, a Podcast, and a Billion Downloads
In January 2021, Father Mike Schmitz, a priest from the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, launched The Bible in a Year. The concept was almost aggressively simple: walk listeners through the entire Catholic Bible in 365 daily episodes of about twenty minutes each. He read Scripture aloud, said a prayer, and offered a short reflection.
Five years later, the podcast surpassed one billion downloads. One freaking billion. It debuted at number one across all Apple Podcast categories, well beyond just religion. It has remained among the most shared shows every year since. That is chart dominance usually reserved for true crime and celebrity gossip. Certainly not a Catholic priest working through the Book of Numbers.
Father Schmitz did not water down the content. He did not chase trends or imitate influencer aesthetics. He offered something long, demanding, and sincere. And millions of people said yes. In a media environment that rewards brevity and outrage, a twenty-minute daily commitment to ancient texts was exactly what the market wanted. If that does not qualify as a disruptive product, what does?
Praying the Rosary at Four in the Morning (With a Million Friends)
On the other side of the equator, a Brazilian Carmelite friar named Gilson da Silva Pupo Azevedo, known nationally as Frei Gilson, decided during Lent 2020 that giving up sweets and soda was no longer much of a sacrifice. So he offered God something harder: his sleep. He began livestreaming the Rosary on YouTube at 4 a.m.
By 2025, Frei Gilson was Brazil’s most-watched streamer. Let me emphasize: the most watched streamer in the country, all categories included. Gaming commentators, sports channels, fashion influencers, all behind a Carmelite friar chanting the Rosary before dawn. His content accumulated over 153 million hours of viewing time that year. During Lent 2026, more than 1.5 million people simultaneously tuned in to his broadcast.
He wears a brown habit. He keeps a shaved head. He makes no concessions to televangelism’s polished production values. His content is long, repetitive, and openly devotional. He breaks every rule in the algorithm’s playbook, and the algorithm rewards him for it. As researcher Rodrigo Toniol, who recently returned from studying digital religion in Rome, put it: “This powerful 2,000-year-old institution is a master at transforming itself to overcome crises. Phenomena such as that of Frei Gilson show that Catholicism, far from dying, is reinventing itself.”
A Gospel Adaptation in 125 Languages
The Chosen, the crowdfunded television series about the life of Jesus, earned its second Guinness World Record in February 2026 as the most translated streaming series in history. Season one is now available in 125 languages. Netflix offers its content in 45. The nonprofit behind the series, Come and See, has set a target of 600 languages to make the show accessible to 95 percent of the world’s population. They employ over 200 linguists, theologians, and biblical scholars and use artificial intelligence to accelerate translation. More than 280 million people across 175 countries have watched the series so far. A global media operation running on a rather Franciscan budget.
The Pope, the Priests, and ChatGPT
Now for the irony.
On February 19, 2026, Pope Leo XIV met privately with clergy from the Diocese of Rome and urged priests to resist “the temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence.” The brain, he said, is like a muscle: if we do not use it, it atrophies. “To give a true homily is to share faith,” the Pope added. And AI “will never be able to share faith.”
Fair enough. On almost the same day, the Vatican announced an AI-powered translation at St. Peter’s Basilica. Pilgrims scan a QR code at the entrance to follow the Mass in up to 60 languages, with audio and text, in real time. No app download required.
Some viewed it as a logical step in the centuries-long struggle to express biblical teachings in the common language of the people, a key criticism of Martin Luther if you want to get historical. The Argentine economist Eduardo Remolins made a sharp observation about this in his newsletter. The Pope’s warning, he argued, targeted the cognitive laziness that comes with total delegation, not the technology itself. A priest who uses AI to find historical context or theological references for his sermon is doing something very different from a priest who pastes the Gospel into ChatGPT and reads whatever comes out. This distinction matters.
Something’s Happening
According to data compiled by the prayer app Hallow from more than 140 U.S. dioceses, the average diocese saw a 38 percent increase in adult converts entering the Church at Easter 2026 compared to the previous year. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles alone welcomed more than 8,000 new Catholics. The Diocese of Duluth, Father Schmitz’s home diocese, saw a 145 percent increase. Many dioceses reported record highs not seen in 15 or 20 years.
The New York Times reported on the surge in March. One detail stood out: online Catholic voices were often more formative than local parishes in drawing converts. A 19-year-old from Nevada told the Times that Catholic podcasters like Father Schmitz were the biggest influence in his journey. “A lot of people spend their time scrolling through TikTok,” he said. “My version of that is apologetics.” Both his parents are now in catechism classes too.
Gen Z Catholic influencers are all over Instagram and TikTok. America Magazine researchers say Catholicism resonates online with younger generations because it is intellectually rigorous, aesthetically rich, and more represented in popular media.
Adaptability as Tradition
Is there a pattern here? I think so.
The Catholic Church is deploying AI translation at St. Peter’s, hosting the world’s most downloaded religious podcast, many Catholics (including Jesus himself) are part of the most translated streaming series in history, and drawing millions to pre-dawn rosary livestreams led by a friar in a brown habit. All of this while the Pope calmly reminds priests to keep thinking for themselves.
That only looks paradoxical if you assume the Church is allergic to new tools. It has never been. The printing press was once scary and disruptive. After some fumbling, the Church used it to distribute catechisms across continents. Radio, television, and the internet were also absorbed, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brilliantly. The question in Rome has never been whether to adopt a new medium, but where to draw the line between what the machine can do and what only a human being should.
The lesson applies far beyond any basilica’s walls. Technology is a means. Organizations that last for centuries—whether you admire them or not—learn which work benefits from new tools and which work loses its soul if delegated.
And there is a joke that Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) used to tell: Napoleon once declared he would destroy the Church. A cardinal is said to have replied: “Your Majesty, we have not even managed to do that ourselves.”
After two thousand years, the oldest startup in the world keeps shipping.
* Federico N. Fernández is a visionary leader dedicated to driving innovation and change. As the CEO of We Are Innovation, a global network of over 50 think tanks and NGOs, Federico champions innovative solutions worldwide. His expertise and passion for innovation have earned him recognition from prestigious publications such as The Economist, El País, Folha de São Paulo, and Newsweek. Federico has also delivered inspiring speeches and lectures across four continents, authored numerous scholarly articles, and co-edited several books on economics.
Source: We Are Innovation
