The National Catholic Register portal reports on a peculiar spectacle orchestrated by Father Leo Patalinghug, a Voluntas Dei “priest” and EWTN personality, who organized a pilgrimage for so-called “Catholic-curious” social media influencers to sacred sites in Baltimore, Maryland. The article, dated April 13, 2026, describes how non-Catholics, evangelicals, pagans, and spiritual seekers were invited to experience Catholicism through a curated three-day event featuring church tours, meals at a restaurant called “The Gastro Social,” Catholic trivia games, and the distribution of sacramentals as gifts. Patalinghug frames this as a response to a “positive trend” of online curiosity about the Catholic faith, attributing it to the intercession of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati. He describes the influencers as being “like kids in a candy shop, hungry for the Catholic Church’s spiritual sweetness” and celebrates how the event created an “OCIA in 3D, Technicolor and scratch-and-siff.” The article reveals not a genuine work of evangelization but a symptom of the post-conciliar Church’s capitulation to digital culture, its reduction of sacred realities to experiential entertainment, and its abandonment of the supernatural mission of the Church in favor of marketing Catholicism as a consumer product for the spiritually restless masses.
