‘Gen Z are looking for miracles and angels’: How TikTok became the new church for budding Catholics

Trying to navigate a world in crisis, more young people are looking to a higher power for comfort and guidance – and finding it online

Three years ago, at the age of 20, Maria Stichini heard the voice of God at 3am. 
“I woke up in the middle of the night and there was blood on the floor,” she says. “I heard a voice tell me to look to the ground, and on my carpet there was something dark, it was wet.” 
Facetiming from the sunny climes of Portugal, Stichini looks like your average 23 year old. Just back from the gym, she wears a casual black running top, framed by long dusty blonde hair.
“I was really confused. I remember I got out of bed and I started touching the ground to see if it was wet, and it felt humid. Then the voice told me ‘that’s the blood of Jesus’.”
Having rejected her Catholic upbringing at the age of 16, Stichini rediscovered her faith in the wake of this incident, becoming part of a growing cultural phenomenon known as Gen Z trad (or traditional) Catholics. Stichini, from Albufeira, works as a receptionist in a hotel and is fluent in both English and Portuguese.
Now she wears a traditional lace veil, known as a mantilla, to Latin Mass – which she attends twice a month. She also prays “at least five times a day”, owns seven rosaries (one of which she keeps permanently under her pillow), and attends church once a week – a place where she says she meets “loads of young people”. 
But there’s another type of church to which young Catholics are flocking at the moment – TikTok. The social media platform is fast becoming the community hub for young Catholics all over the world to come together and connect. Videos posted there have become part of a growing trend labelled “Catholic Tok” or “God Tok”. They show young people “veiling up”, the process of putting on a veil to go to church, praying with rosaries, lighting candles and using holy water.
“It was quite hard, because my friends weren’t so accepting of me being a practising Catholic,” says Stichini. “And when I got to TikTok, I found out that there’s this whole community. I just felt more accepted and not as weird. You think you’re the odd one out, and suddenly there’s this whole world of people that are just like you.” Her videos, which share her Catholic experiences, including her conversion story, now have over 100,000 likes.
The online community isn’t just a focal point for those already of faith, either. As the movement grows, Catholic conversions are also happening because of TikTok itself. “There’s a lot of younger people, younger than me, just going to TikTok and then starting to be more curious about the church and the history of Catholicism,” explains Stichini.
Those who convert are typically between the ages of 15 and 20, says Stichini, and often point to having stumbled across other Catholics on TikTok first. “I have this one girl who’s messaging me, she said that she was raised with no religion and she saw my TikToks,” says Natalie Zadrima, another Gen Z catholic TikToker with 135,000 likes and 3,000 followers. The 24 year old lives in New York, where she is a development coordinator in the TV and film industry.
“She’s been interested in Christianity, specifically Catholicism. She has some questions, and she doesn’t know who to go to, so she’s been asking me questions and I’ve been helping her and guiding her. Trying to answer her questions as best as I can. But obviously she originally found this information on TikTok.”
Allied to the rise in interest, the Catholic fashion industry is booming too. Clare Short, who runs catholic clothing company Di Clara from her home in the Isle of Wight, says that sales of lace veils have doubled since 2019. During lockdown – the time when TikTok really came into its own – the company saw sales increase 500 per cent. Short said: “Increasing numbers of young men in their 20’s and 30’s [are] buying their wife’s veils as anniversary or Christmas gifts, often at the request of the wife.”
Zadrima herself owns a “marriage headscarf” which she found on a Catholic clothing website called Litany, for which she paid around $50.
Catholic influencers have started their own businesses too. Becky Lilley, 21, from Canada, has a sewing business where she handmakes veils for followers. Also known as “Catholica Pandam”, the Latin translation of “Catholic panda”, she has 282,000 followers on Instagram, and sells a range of merchandise on her website including branded T-shirts with “Ave Maria” and “Hi friends, it’s Becky” on them. 
Lilley, who has autism, attended a Catholic school before enrolling for a bachelor of arts programme at a Catholic university. Though she intends to finish her degree, she has no career plans other than her sewing business. “I want to be a homemaker, and a wife and a mother,” she said in a recent live Q&A conducted on Instagram.
A post shared by Becky (@catholica.pandam)
Lilley also creates her own Catholic Tok videos where she puts a holy spin on viral TikTok trends. In one video with almost 10,000 likes, she dances in a veil to Charlie XCX’s song Apple from the album Brat. As part of a paid partnership with clothing company SondeFlor, Lilley changed “Brat girl summer” to “Brat Cat[holic] summer”.
The 21-year-old also films herself refilling “holy water stations” around her house for her husband to bless himself with when he arrives home from work. When she reached 250,000 followers on Instagram, her priest hosted the couple for a celebratory dinner “to congratulate [her] on growing [her] online ministry”. Her husband, 24-year-old Ian Lilley, is a fellow Catholic and also has autism. The two met at church and quickly “fell in love” before getting married in June of this year.
Offline, interest in religion among the young appears to be having something of a renaissance too. In the UK, weekly attendance for Church of England services among children under the age of 16 was up by almost six per cent last year. This was higher than the overall rise of five per cent, which marked a third consecutive year of growth among congregations. While this has in part been attributed to numbers rebounding post-pandemic – with the Christian faith still in decline in the UK compared to decades gone by – spirituality more generally does appear to be in vogue. A recent study by Theos, the religion and society think-tank, discovered that although about half of British adults now say that they have “no religion”, 42 per cent of those believe in some form of the supernatural.
“They are being attracted towards a range of different spiritual beliefs and practices, including Catholicism,” says Chine McDonald, Theos’s director. “The increase in the numbers of influencers talking about their Catholic faith, including its rituals and aesthetic, will attract those who are spiritually open to find out more.”
The uptick in interest is directly linked to the unsettled world young people have grown up in, according to McDonald. “This generation of young people have grown up in a time of perma-crisis, their formative years having taken place against a backdrop of a global pandemic, economic instability, the rise of populism, war and climate catastrophe. At times of uncertainty, it’s understandable that many would be drawn to the stability of ancient religious practice,” she says. “Within Catholicism, the rhythm and practice of prayer and the Latin Mass provide that sense of steadiness.” 
But do Gen Z Christians actually subscribe to more traditional values? Stichini says she’s never identified as a feminist, but “appreciated” the role of women more after becoming Catholic. Lilley, meanwhile, describes herself as a “helpmate” to her husband. “I view it as my biblical calling to help sustain my husband, like he helps to keep me going too,” she says in one video which has nearly 15,000 likes.
A post shared by Becky (@catholica.pandam)
“In short, the young people I’m seeing coming to faith are seeking the opposite of the expressive individualism that’s been offered to them,” says Rev Glen Scrivener, director of evangelistic ministry Speak Life. “They are wanting something ancient, deep, communal, embodied, challenging, and transcendent. 
“Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called Gen Z ‘the anxious generation’. It’s no surprise to me that we’re seeing refugees from an uncertain world seeking securities that have stood the test of time.” 
Dave Male, the co-director for vision and Strategy at the Church of England, attributes the boom to a generation particularly keen to believe that there is something at work beyond themselves. “The Christian message is new and fresh for Gen Z. They are not looking for watered down or purely rationalistic faith but miracles, angels and visions,” he says. “These are now not the ‘crazy’ part of faith but [instead] what might draw people into exploring more.” 
And in the spiritual land of TikTok, at least, it’s clear that miracles are happening.