By Pierre-Paul Anani Dossekpli

From 19 to 21 October, at the Augustinianum Patristic Institute, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints held the conference Holiness in History: three days devoted to historiography, archives, iconography, the saints of the different regions of the world, and the contemporary narration of holiness, with the audience with Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday 21.

Among those attending was Fr. Andrea Mandonico, SMA, archivist and postulator of our Society, who worked on the cause for the canonization of Charles de Foucauld and told his life story in his book My God, How Good You Are: The Life and Message of Charles de Foucauld. His assessment is clear: “It was an important conference that needed to be held.” Previous conferences had addressed spirituality at a high level, the mystical one; they lacked this historical root. The conference reminded us that all holiness needs a place, specific people, an era, and responds to the needs of the Church of its time.

A Question That Can No Longer Be Avoided

On Wednesday morning, Prof. Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli (Pontifical Gregorian University) presented her paper Reputation for Holiness and Forms of Devotion and Worship: sources and interpretive problems in the history of piety. In the conclusion, she addressed a theme the Dicastery has already raised officially, devoting a day of the October 2022 conference Holiness Today to it: the reputation for holiness in the digital environment.

The canonization of Carlo Acutis in September 2025 made the problem unavoidable: for the first time, we face a reputation that was born and grew largely online, even before forming around a tomb.

What Is Truly New

The phenomenon itself is not new. The reputation for holiness has always been a communicative fact, transmitted by the means available in each era, from the manuscript vita to the printed holy card; each technological leap has changed its speed and reach, and each time the Church has had to recalibrate the tools of discernment. The internet is the latest link in a long chain.

The novelty, according to the speaker, is of a different order and can be summed up in three points:

1. Reputation forms outside the territory as well. For centuries, the cult was a local matter, tied to the body, the tomb, the community that had known the servant of God. Today, transnational communities of devotion form around figures whom their members have never met, either physically or in the places of memory.
2. Mediation is no longer only human. Between the voice of the faithful and its diffusion stands the algorithm, a non-neutral agent that selects and amplifies what “works” according to logics foreign to virtue. Reputation is no longer only what a community says: it is also what a platform decides to show.
3. The boundary between received and constructed reputation becomes almost undecidable. Lambertini’s doctrine already distinguished spontaneous reputation from that which is procured, but online, visibility is structurally produced, by campaigns, managed accounts, and postulations that are legitimately doing their job.

An Opportunity for the Historian of Piety

The web is first of all, the speaker stressed, a first-rate opportunity: an extraordinary repository of devotional expressions. Prayer intentions and accounts of graces on postulation websites and in social groups, virtual candles, shared novenas, and digital holy cards are the functional equivalents of the books of miracles, the registers of ex-votos, and the pilgrim lists that we read for the Middle Ages and the modern era, with one advantage: they are dated, serial, and quantifiable. For the first time, we can observe the birth of a reputation almost in real time, instead of reconstructing it after the fact from the testimonies of a trial.

Documentable Does Not Mean Measurable

Here lie the risks. Each of the canonical requirements meets a specific obstacle online:

• the reputation must be spontaneous, but online visibility is produced;
• it must be stable and continuous, but virality is episodic: a peak measures the attention of a moment, not duration, and the time series available are still too short;
• it must be spread among trustworthy people, but anonymity removes the qualitative criterion of the graviorum virorum iudicium, (the judgment of the elders), which, since Lambertini, has accompanied and corrected the quantitative data;
• it must involve a significant part of the People of God, but social media users are not a sample of the faithful: certain age groups, certain language areas, and certain ecclesial milieus are overrepresented.

Above all, a “like,” a view, or a share attests to notoriety, not to an opinion about virtue, nor to the act of invoking. Fama sanctitatis is a judgment followed by a practice; celebrity is something else, and the internet measures only the latter well. Add to this the pastoral risks already highlighted by the 2022 conference: hagiographic oversimplification, commercialization, and the distortions and mystifications against which Pope Francis warned, recalling that reputation is genuine when it withstands the changes of time and the fashions of the moment.

Four Challenges for the Dicastery

Operationally, the speaker identified at least four challenges:

• Methodological. Digital traces must be recognized as a new type of source and subjected to the same critique as a medieval collection of miracles: who produced it, with what interest, for what audience, by what means. This requires skills that diocesan tribunals and postulations do not systematically have today.
• Evidentiary. How can one acquire, preserve, and verify online testimony that is replicable, manipulable, and easily stripped of context?
• Regulatory. The 2021 letter to bishops, which asked them to verify the consistency and genuineness of the reputation, probably needs to be updated with explicit criteria on the digital activity of postulations, because the line between informing and procuring a reputation is today subtler than the normative text presupposes.
• The principle of cross-checking. No digital reputation should be considered without verification in offline practices: the tomb, pilgrimages, sworn testimonies, concrete devotional forms. In the passage from the network to the place, reputation shows whether it is judgment and practice or merely rumor.

Neither Ignoring nor Idolizing

The conclusion is a balance. Ignoring the internet is not possible, because a growing part of piety is deposited and expressed there. Treating it as a measure of reputation would be an equally serious mistake, because it would confuse notoriety with holiness, the very confusion that the norms of the trials were created to avoid. The task of the historian of piety remains, today as in past centuries, to read critically the forms in which a community manifests what it believes, knowing that the source has changed, but the question has not.

Reputation on social media is built on visibility: it is measured in followers and shares, rewards speed and brilliance, and shows how widely one is seen—not who one is. The reputation for holiness follows almost the opposite logic. It cannot be manufactured; it is recognized by those who knew someone, observed their life over time, and turn to them in prayer. The risk is allowing the first kind of reputation to distort the second: a servant of God becomes “content,” a quotation detached from its context, or an image that is easy to love, while demanding or discreet figures go unnoticed—not because they lack holiness, but because they “work” poorly on screen. Social networks should not be rejected: they bring dispersed faithful together and make hidden witnesses known. But we must never mistake an audience for a sign.

Remaining Faithful to History

Fr. Andrea’s words and Prof. Bartolomei Romagnoli’s paper illuminate each other. If all holiness needs a place and concrete people, then digital reputation too must be verified there, in practices, places, and testimonies. For those who, like us, keep archives and accompany causes, it is an invitation to remain faithful to history, whatever form it takes today.