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A few months back I wrote a piece called “Influencers vs. Saints.” The whole point was simple. Teaching the Faith is not a hobby for the spiritually unformed. We are in a weird stretch of Church history where anyone with a smartphone can position themselves as an authority or teacher on the Catholic Faith. I said we needed saints not stars.
I knew a follow-up article would be coming. I just did not expect to be writing it this on this topic.
Let me say up front. I love digital missionaries. I love teaching and evangelizing in the digital space myself. The internet is a real shot at reaching people where they are, and the Lord absolutely uses it. If St. Paul would have had the internet in his day, he would have given towns videos, instead of letters.
This is not a criticism of documenting someone’s faith journey. The trouble is not that people share their journey publicly. Conversion stories matter. I am a convert myself, and other people’s stories are part of how I got here. Fr. John Corapi’s conversion story became a big part of my own. (I still pray for him.)
Watching a soul wrestle with grace and authenticity in real time can move somebody toward Christ in a way no textbook ever will. I am living proof that conversion stories help people relate what they are walking through to someone who has already walked the same road. However, the trouble starts when the digital space runs on our terms instead of God’s. When the platform grows faster than the formation underneath, things go array very quickly.
For reference, I waited seven years before sharing my own conversion story publicly. I wanted to be formed first. Not just theologically, but spiritually and emotionally as well.
If you have spent any time on Catholic social media in the last year, you probably know who Neeza Powers is. The short version is that Neeza is a man who lived for years as a “transgender woman” named Nicole. In 2025, he announced that he had encountered Jesus and was stepping away from his transgender identity.
His audience exploded. I mean exploded. 354k followers on Instagram. 250k on TikTok with 6.4 million views. 25k subscribers on YouTube. He and his fiancée Charlotte visited different churches looking for a place to land, eventually walking into a Catholic parish. They said that they fell in love with the Mass. They soon after signed up for OCIA.
Catholic media booked him for interviews. Neeza was everywhere in the Catholic social media space. People were celebrating, and honestly I wanted to celebrate too. Even the Hallow prayer app brought him on as a contributor.
But then everything shifted. This Easter the wheels came off. Neeza had planned to enter the Church at the Easter Vigil. His parish priest, doing exactly what good shepherds are supposed to do, told him no. He said Neeza was not ready.
Reports point to a lack of attendance at OCIA, which is a perfectly reasonable reason to hit pause on the sacraments. OCIA is not some hoop you jump through on the way to a baptism photo op. In the early Church, catechumens often spent up to three years being formed and examined before they were welcomed in. The Church deliberately slowed people down before granting full participation, let alone leadership or a public voice.
That is also why every catechumen still gets a sponsor today. Sponsors are there to help walk with the catechumens on this journey. Did you know that having sponsors goes back to the persecution era, when sponsors had to vouch that a new believer was not a Roman spy? There were real risks to bringing a new person into the Church. They could be someone who would turn them into the authorities for confessing Christ as Lord rather than Caesar, getting everyone martyred in the process.
The early Church did not mess around with this, and neither should we. OCIA is how the Church introduces people to the deepest mysteries of the Faith.
This is not the Church gatekeeping. She is guarding something sacred. We call it the deposit of faith. Like a bank holding something precious in safekeeping, the Church protects what Christ entrusted to her. The slow walk is not about making it hard to get in. It is about preparing hearts to actually receive the gift of becoming part of God’s family.
Entering the Church is a commitment, not a casual step for social media attention. This is serious, and catechumens need to fully understand what you are saying yes to and to be ready to live it.
That “no” was a serious blow. Within weeks, Neeza started posting and deleting videos, and on April 28 he announced he was “re-transitioning.”
Some of Neeza’s recent public statements are worth sitting with. He said “coming out as a trans woman in church and online hasn’t been met with grace, but I couldn’t self loathe any longer.” He said it was time to “stop being who Christians say I should be and be the WOMAN Christ knows and loves.”
We are not asked to judge hearts or motives. That is God’s job. Still, for eight months he was telling everyone, “I’m finally at peace as a man,” and now the message is the opposite. Looking back over the whole journey, a lot of pieces just do not add up, and the skeptical side of me cannot help noticing how out of step his new statements are with what he was saying not long ago.
I want to be careful here, though. His sins are no worse than the sins of anyone else walking through the doors of the Church for the first time. We are all wrecks in need of Jesus. The real difference is not the size of the sin. It is whether you see your sin as something Christ needs to heal in you or as something that is just “part of who I am.” Jesus came to heal sinners, but only sinners who are willing to admit they are sinners. If we cannot call our sin what it is, we cannot receive the mercy flowing from His Sacred Heart.
Neeza’s gender confusion, once it gets rebranded as identity, is really a quiet challenge to the God who made him. God does not make mistakes. He did not get Neeza wrong. He did not get any of us wrong.
These last few rollout videos have also handed the louder LGBTQ voices online exactly what they have been waiting for, another reason to swing at the Church for not being “inclusive” enough. All really are welcome in the Church. Just on Christ’s terms, not ours.
Hallow distanced themselves the moment things shifted, and good for them. That is what we want from a Catholic platform. The bigger question is how a brand-new catechumen ended up at the center of so much Catholic attention before he had even been received into the Church.
Underneath all of this is something we have to say plainly. Identity is not ours to invent. It comes from Christ, and the Church has been faithfully passing it on for two thousand years. To be at war with our own bodies is to be at war with the meaning of our lives. The body is not a costume the soul is wearing. It is part of who God made us. Body and soul.
Love without truth is not love. The Church does not lie to people to make them feel better. She loves them enough to tell them the truth. That is where real charity actually lives, with truth and love standing together.
Fr. Leo at Plating Grace, who spent time with Neeza and Charlotte during this season, framed it as cleanly as anyone has. Conversion is learning to deny yourself and what you believe about yourself, and to follow Christ and what He says about you, which is that you are wonderfully made and that God does not make mistakes. To convert is to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.
It is not following your heart. Following your heart was never part of the Gospel. Our hearts are broken. Jesus gives us a new heart, makes us a new creation in Him.
God loves you the way you are. But He loves you so much He does not want you to stay there. He wants you to be a saint. He wants you to be who He actually made you to be. St. Francis de Sales put it like this: “Be who you are and be that well, that you may bring honor to the Master Craftsman.” God designed us and formed us in the womb.
St. Catherine of Siena said, “Be who God created you to be, and you will set the world on fire.” The flip side is just as true. If we are not His, we still set things on fire. We just burn what we touch and add more harm to a divided and broken world.
This is why St. Paul keeps coming to mind. In Ephesians 4:14, he warns the Church not to be “children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” A new believer with a hundred thousand followers feels every gust on the internet, and there are a lot of winds blowing. In 1 Corinthians 3:2, Paul adds, “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it.” There is an order to the Christian life. Milk first. Then meat. You do not put a catechumen on a national platform two months after they walk through the church doors.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux gave us the metaphor we need: “If you are wise, you will be reservoirs and not channels only. The channel pours out what it receives. The reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing.” A reservoir has time to fill. A channel is just water moving through. We have a generation of new converts being asked to be channels before they have been allowed to fill. Attention floods in, the evil one whispers that it is your talent and not the grace poured into you, and pride seeps in long before anyone notices.
Instead of becoming channels of grace, a lot of new believers end up becoming channels of content, building their own platform before they have been deeply formed. I can’t help but think of how Jesus warned of exactly this dilemma in the Parable of the Sower. Jesus said:
“When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Mt. 13:19-23)
That seems to be where Neeza is right now. The seed is good, and the Sower is faithful. The soil just was not ready yet. The hopeful part of the parable is that the same ground that cannot grow anything today can be turned over and made ready tomorrow. That is what we are praying for.
So the question then arises, who should we be listening to? Catholics who live their faith online, sure, but who also live it in their parishes. One foot in the digital world and one firmly in the sacramental parish life. On their knees in the pew. At the daily Mass. Spending time in Adoration. Praying the Rosary. Serving the poor while nobody is filming. People who have suffered for this faith. People who sacrifice. People who have denied themselves something real, given years to prayer and the sacraments, and let the Church form them long before they ever assumed they had anything worth teaching the rest of us.
We need Catholics who love the sinner and hate the sin. Catholics who can hold truth and love in the same breath without watering one down to deliver the other. Clarity with charity. Truth and love in tandem. That is the whole game.
The Church has always taught this. Formation precedes mission. Identity precedes influence. Conversion is the start of the road, not the qualification to teach others how to walk it.
Even those brave enough to share their journey publicly have to remember how easy it is to wound the Church and stir up confusion when they have not yet been filled. The Sower is always faithful, and the seed is always good. The question is whether the soil is ready to receive it.
Please pray for Neeza and Charlotte. Pray for the priest in their parish who had the courage to say, “not yet.” Continue to pray for those who were just received into the Church at Easter that the Lord will continue to work on them. We pray for those sharing the Gospel on social media, that they let Christ rebuild them from the inside out. To be holy. To bring unity to the body of Christ. That we may be ONE.
The Church does not need more stars. She needs saints.
Photo by Leuchtturm Entertainment on Unsplash
