If you thought only dioceses and parishes could build Digital Cathedrals, think again.
The entire Catholic world needs Digital Cathedrals. Non-profits, schools, universities, initiatives, and even Catholic for-profit businesses.
What Is a Digital Cathedral?
For the Catholic world, a Digital Cathedral is an online ecosystem, including web, social, email, apps, etc., that strengthens its core base of believers while simultaneously attracting new people to in-person communion with each other and Christ.
STOP! This is extremely important. Digital metrics are not enough. Digital engagement is not enough. Digital beginnings must result in real-world actions. This is the true measure of success.
We’re NOT talking about a literal building made of pixels in Minecraft, Roblox, or the metaverse. A Digital Cathedral will not replace a real one. It will help to fill it.
These are tapestries of meaningful content where vice meets virtue, pain meets healing, and secularization meets evangelization.
In 2026 we’re highlighting parishes, dioceses, foundations, education, initiatives, non-profits, and even for-profit Catholic businesses that are building Digital Cathedrals.
Let’s talk about Openlight Media.
How Is Openlight Media Building a Digital Cathedral?
The Website
Openlight is at the forefront of education and formation. Through a combination of cutting edge neuroscience, sound psychology, and contextualized in the teachings of the Church, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, are promoting the development of the whole person—mind, body, and soul.
Because of such a massive undertaking, Openlight has to market itself to many different audience personas across geographies, income brackets, political contexts, and a diversifying educational landscape.
The only way to do that is with an audience-first approach. Openlight, as of this writing, is in the midst of launching a long-planned web refresh.
Yellow Line Digital worked with Openlight for a year in 2024-2025 to help set it on its current path and build its Digital Cathedral with these three integral strategies:
- An audience-first approach to make subscribing clearly valuable to target personas
- Put Sisters on camera as spiritual guides, teachers, and humans
- Optimize digital content to tap into broad conversations framed by relevant keywords
Each of their programs has a value proposition for a specific audience, be that parents, students, teachers, school administrators, pastors, or homeschoolers.
Audiences always begin with questions and problems. In this case it’s finding the best education and formation for either themselves or their dependents, such as children. Rather than overwhelm visitors with everything Openlight is, the hero role is filled by the audience, not the brand, and so visitors encounter what will solve their problem.
Openlight redesigned their website to meet audiences where they are and show the value of its programs. The flagship Plus Subscription page—where all engagement with Openlight leads—is organized by grade level. Free resources are made available as part of the reason why to spend money on what the Sisters are doing.
AI bots are starting to take notice. Queries in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek, etc. about Catholic education routinely surface Education in Virtue as an option for parishes, families, and schools.
The Results?
Openlight’s efforts to optimize its blog content around Catholic social and emotional learning, classroom tactics, virtues, Catholic teaching, Dominican spirituality, and practical tactics for teaching and disciplining at home and in schools have produced huge traffic numbers for the site.
The Openlight site sees roughly 6,000 monthly web visitors in search traffic from 1,000+ optimized high-ranking keywords such as “affability”, “sincerity,” “list of virtues,” “virtues in education,” “cardinal virtues,” “sound judgement,” “kerygma,” various saints, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These in addition to branded keywords such as various Dominican Sisters who appear on social media, products such as “Education in Virtue” and “Raised in Grace,” “SEL,” and more.
Combined with referral, social media, direct, and other traffic sources, Openlight will sometimes see traffic reach 20,000 users in a single month. Between October and November 2025, the site saw an explosion of over 200,000 users, driven by pre-Advent launch campaigns.
Far more important than site traffic, the 44 domain rating score, or the 5,300 backlinks from over 1,400 websites is the impact on real students, parents, and teachers. Education in Virtue is used in 13 dioceses, 89 countries, and over 850 schools globally. The Sisters themselves teach in 3 universities, and 27 elementary and high schools across 10 states.
Those engaged with Openlight’s programs see noticeable drops in discipline incidents, better communication through a shared language, and a movement away from “performance” to integrity, virtue, and community. Read more here and here.
Social Media
Openlight Media is not shy when it comes to spreading the word about its approach to education. Its blend of science and theology, practicality and virtue, and joy and discipline all contribute to a digital presence that is engaging, and not just for teachers and parents but also for Catholics and non-Catholics struggling with belief and Church teaching.
Openlight builds its marketing around answering questions. This is indispensable. Our world is seeking, asking, and experimenting. Engagement with the internet, which constitutes most of our waking hours, is consumed by asking questions, distracting ourselves from wounds, and finding solutions to challenges.
Openlight puts the audience’s goals and obstacles first. It then meets that audience transparently and honestly, so that mutuality is arrived at.
The Results?
Openlight exploded on social media in 2026!
In the summer of 2025, Openlight Media had:
- 4.2K Facebook fans
- 2K followers on Instagram
- 30.9K subscribers on YouTube
- No TikTok account
As of September 2026, Openlight has:
- 33.3K Facebook fans
- 152K followers on Instagram
- 51.8K subscribers on YouTube
- 292K followers on TikTok
Openlight is also on Pinterest with over 10,000 monthly views and launched on TeachersPayTeachers with YLD’s help, since its products are made by teachers for teachers.
The podcast has experienced a 3,500% increase in listeners the past 12 months, now boasting more than 100,000 listeners and 500,000 plays and has been featured in The New York Times, US Weekly, the Today Show, National Catholic Register, and many other outlets.
Podcast clips went viral on TikTok reaching the least expected communities, and yet comments were overwhelmingly positive. Phrases from the podcast, such as “Sister you’re so good at that,” have become trending sounds. The total impact will never be fully understood in this life. While not all engagement is about God or virtue, the Lord works in mysterious ways and can touch hardened or distant hearts due to the Sisters’ efforts.
They’re a hit! Why?
Because of the Sisters and their love for Christ. They are teachers, caregivers, mentors, leaders, writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and more who appear in short videos, podcasts, carousels, and other forms of digital content to talk faith, education, parenting, childhood, hobbies, struggles, culture, conversion, and all of life.
Holiness is irresistible. Joyful nuns who sacrifice and reject the world’s ways, yet radiate love for life and understand the mediums of the modern world are almost guaranteed to break through the noise of the internet and find listeners.
In the past 12 months, nearly 12 million people have engaged with Openlight’s content.
That doesn’t just produce vocations for the order—which has grown from 4 to 140 since 1997—it produces great interest in the educational and formational philosophy behind Openlight Media, making Education in Virtue, Raised in Grace, and Remain in Me highly sought-after programs for elementary, middle, and high schools.
Why Are We Calling Openlight Media a Digital Cathedral?
What the Sisters and the Openlight team have done online to inspire religious vocations, new approaches to education, and a better understanding of virtues as they relate to social and emotional learning, neuroscience, and the mental health crisis in America is nothing short of breathtaking.
There’s a profound lesson for the Catholic world here. We are always asked the question, “how does my organization become successful with the help of digital marketing?”
The answer is usually internal, not external to your organization. The passion, talent, and value your team offers to audiences looking to break through obstacles in their lives.
Pick up a camera. Tell a story. Have a conversation. Show the audience that what you’re doing really works and how much you believe in it.
By using engaging formats, posting consistently, optimizing for what people actually type into browsers, chatbots, and social platforms, and just being themselves, Openlight has created an ecosystem that more than meets the criteria of a Digital Cathedral.
Openlight Media’s Key Performance Indicators
Let’s explore the three KPIs of a Digital Cathedral are invitation, innovation, and participation.
- Invitational: The Sisters don’t post because they want attention. They post to introduce Christ into more schools, homes, and lives. That invitation is clear, important, and necessary.
- Innovative: By introducing the Torch App (over 9,000 downloads), marketing the integration of neuroscience with Thomistic teachings, going to where audiences seek tools and ideas such as Pinterest, TeachersPayTeachers, Facebook groups, and more, Openlight is showing a willingness to take risks, be bold, and try new things.
- Participatory: Content is far from a one-way street. Audiences never leave without something to do. Even without a child to enroll, a packet to buy, new material to read, or a prayer routine to begin, viewers of content participate by going to the Sisters for counsel, companionship, and encouragement.
A Digital Cathedral can only be called a Digital Cathedral if there are real-world results.
Why Is Building a Digital Cathedral Important?
Digital Cathedrals begin online and end offline.
We are not interested in vanity metrics. Billions of impressions, likes, even shares, and leads mean nothing without real life being positively impacted.
The Digital Cathedral, intentionally well built, is hard to miss. It not only draws awareness, but it draws people in, as the medieval cathedrals of old did.
They must be built with the same care, skill, and attention to detail.
It refutes the world’s emphasis on addictive scrolling and moneymaking and cultivates in-person relationships by using the tools where touchpoints happen.
Across the Catholic world, organizations and businesses need to put the audience first and keep it that way. Think from the perspective of what is obstructing value, beauty, and purpose in someone’s life, and what do I offer to remove that obstacle so that audiences can reach worthwhile goals.
“Renew your commitment to nourish Christian hope in social networks and online spaces.” (Pope Leo XIV, Address to Social Media Influencers)
Let’s Collaborate
Yellow Line Digital was blessed to work with the Openlight Media team to help get their Digital Cathedral built and noticed by the world.
If you want to build a Digital Cathedral, then we would love to collaborate. Let’s get started!
Join the conversation! Shoot me an email at mconnors@yellowlinedigital.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
