Meaningful influencers, or – what do influencers have to do with saints, and their followers with believers?
Both can:
- Providing guidance, helping in everyday life
- Being role models
- To exert influence and convey closeness despite spatial distance (from the sky or the cloud).
Marketing and worship are also similar:
- The ring light "halo" symbolizes this connection.
- Then: Trade in relics and devotional items. Today: Trade in perfume and merchandise. Goal: To own a piece of the idol's identity.
Influencers in today's secular society often fulfill the same psychological and social functions as saints did in the Middle Ages.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, the term "influencer " (from the English "to influence") has been used to describe multipliers who use their strong presence and reputation on social networks to promote products, lifestyles, or political ideologies, for example.
(wikipedia 17.07.2026)
"To be canonized, even as an influencer you first have to perform some miracles after your death."
Living people could not be canonized. But a large following during their lifetime certainly favored the process of their canonization by the Roman Catholic Church after their death, both in the Middle Ages and even to this day.
Since the Church itself uses the internet, there is now even an influencer saint: Carlo Acutis was an Italian teenager and as passionate a gamer as he was a collector of Catholic Eucharistic miracles. He died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15. The media and the Catholic Church have dubbed him the influencer of God or the patron saint of the internet. His canonization in 2025 by Pope Leo XIV made him the first saint of the YouTube and TikTok generation. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Acutis )
- Back then: If a person’s martyrdom was seen by church leaders as a sign of divine election, why didn’t that prevent them from having people of other faiths or nonbelievers tortured and killed?
- Heute: Was bringt Menschen dazu, Influencern, die Hass auf andere Menschen predigen, zu liken und ihnen zu folgen?
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