It’s that time again. We’re highlighting Digital Cathedrals in 2026! Another parish has caught our eye.
What Is a Digital Cathedral?
For the Church, it’s a digital ecosystem that can strengthen its core audience while simultaneously attracting new people to in-person communion with others and Christ.
Note that—digital beginnings feeding in-person relationships.
Definitely NOT a literal building made of pixels in Minecraft, Roblox, or the Metaverse.
We’re talking about a tapestry of content where vice meets virtue, pain meets healing, and secularization meets evangelization.
Read more about the Digital Cathedral concept here: What is a Digital Cathedral?
For the third parish highlight of 2026, we’re celebrating the work of St. Pius X Catholic Church in Loudonville, New York.
We’d like to explore the digital strategies and content that are going beyond the choir and reaching lost and wayward souls.
How Is St. Pius X Building a Digital Cathedral?
The Website
Websites remain key tactics for organizations wanting to maintain strong connections to audiences in the know, and wanting to reach the next generation.
On the front page, St. Pius X has clear instructions for the already engaged through Mass times, livestreams, and news. It also clearly labels content for first-time visitors and has a search bar to find anything you’re interested in.
The parish is also showing an intelligent awareness of the diversity within its audience. Catholics can’t be lumped together. There’s a book club for moms, men’s fellowship, family baseball, a soccer program, a podcast, support for the divorced, a place for those in their 20s and 30s, and more.
When I talk to ex-Catholics, curious Catholics, lukewarm, and fallen away, I consistently hear that the barrier to entry for coming back to the Faith is high. Too high. That “there’s nothing for me.” That the Church is outdated and only for old people and children.
St. Pius X Parish has learned that it must meet specific audience personas where they are, lower the barrier to entry, and prioritize digital content if it wants to see increased sacramental life and application of Church teaching.
A parish website must be attractive to the eye, and it must present real-life value to any segment it is legitimately interested in reaching, be that single dads, empty-nesters, doubters, lapsed, unmarried working professionals, new residents, newly married, etc.
The Results?
St. Pius X has grown tremendously over the last several years. It built a new Parish Life Center, and its school, recognized as one of the preeminent Catholic schools available to New Yorkers, attracts families from across the region.
The parish’s Pre-Cana program ranks high in web search results, and the website commands over 400 backlinks and growing. It receives thousands of organic users every month, much of that traffic from mobile devices and highly engaged.
This is very encouraging for a parish, especially one in New York where Catholicism has been on the defensive and has contracted in recent decades. While the Diocese of Albany has dealt with financial losses, contraction due to lukewarm faith and dropping participation, and school closures, St. Pius X is contradicting those trends.
Praise God!
Social Media
The highlight of St. Pius X’s digital success is its social media ecosystem.
The parish has over 5,000 Facebook fans, nearly 2,000 YouTube subscribers, over 7,000 followers on Instagram, and 5,600 on TikTok! The parish is on TikTok! Hallelujah!
Immediately, this provides further evidence of the team’s awareness of audience persona diversity. Posting on one channel will make it difficult to reach the length and breadth of a community. There are simply too many different personas.
Upon visiting Facebook, you notice a lot of photography and video, a clear departure from the muddied or templated graphics we’re used to seeing from parishes.
YouTube is not just for live-streaming Sunday Masses! St. Pius X is posting Shorts, and a lot of them. The topics are amazing and speak to the spirit of evangelization at the parish. Fr. Walsh recognizes that people have doubts and questions and problems. And he’s dedicating time to addressing those in short videos. A perfect strategy for our time.
Instagram, the parish’s largest platform, is a mix of carousels, photos, and Reels. Keep scrolling and you’ll be hard-pressed to find an ugly graphic or anything templated. What you will find are reflections, spiritual direction, community, explanations, and invitations.
Let’s talk about TikTok!
We don’t see many parishes here. Yet St. Pius X has posted 80 videos in the last year. And all of them are oriented toward lowering the barrier of entry for relationship with God and rediscovering the value of Catholicism in everyday life.
The Results?
- A viral video on TikTok and Instagram. Over 18 million views and 1.1 million engagements between the two channels! Creativity and Catholicism can evangelize larger numbers than ever before.
- 1.3 million engagements over the last year, a nearly 5,000% increase.
- A 34% engagement rate for content over the last 365 days. Mostly due to TikTok.
- Over 1,000 posts and hundreds of engagements per post, particularly on Instagram.
The results aren’t just digital engagement.
Often I hear that the reason for hesitation to use social media is that it’s more work than it’s worth. But evangelization is among the top priorities of the Church. Since the Great Commission given at Christ’s Ascension, it always has been.
Investing in social media content, as St. Pius X has, is essential in our current time to reach Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The results of engaging content are not limited to likes and shares. For St. Pius X, school enrollment, increased giving, and most importantly, high attendance of Mass and Confession are directly fueled by digital outreach.
Its reach far exceeds its local community, and that is almost certainly inspiring renewed practice of authentic Catholicism beyond its borders.
I have no doubt that St. Pius X’s efforts on social media have played a role in the increase in OCIA among adults in upstate New York.
Why Are We Calling St. Pius X a Digital Cathedral?
For Church institutions, a Digital Cathedral’s purpose is to lead souls back to in-person communion with others and Christ. Digital engagement exists for the sake of real-world holiness and impact. It is a doorway.
The criteria for a Digital Cathedral are three characteristics, and each characteristic has three dimensions:
- Valuable:
- St. Pius X Catholic Church is valuable for users because it is making profound realities accessible to the everyday person. Locals experience this value with their own eyes, ears, and hearts (senses), with each other (community), and grow in their pursuit of Truth.
- Beautiful:
- Much of culture and content is ugly. Beauty will always stand out. Its connection to the soul is powerful. Digital content must be beautiful. As we scroll, our standards rise, whether we know it or not. To stop our scroll, a post must be amazing.
- Purposeful
- The purpose of a Digital Cathedral’s content is to evangelize. All are in need of catechesis. We’re not happy because we let the world answer our questions. We hire brands and products for the job of our happiness. The Church has something much better to offer, and every parish plays a vital part.
A Digital Cathedral stands out online. It’s relatable and aspirational. It is easy to walk into and simultaneously calls us to more.
St. Pius X’s Key Performance Indicators
The three KPIs of a Digital Cathedral are invitation, innovation, and participation.
- Invitational: Fr. Walsh and his team are constantly inviting online users through digital content.
- Innovative: The parish is using TikTok, short video, and carousels, and is putting people, teachings, and places front and center so that the barrier to entry is as low as possible when audiences make the jump from online to offline.
- Participatory: All of this work is paying off. St. Pius X is thriving!
Why Is Building a Digital Cathedral Important?
Digital Cathedrals begin online and end offline. That is essential to understand.
While our Catholic celebrities grow in influence, our parishes are left behind. But the parish is the heart of the Church.
An effective digital presence greatly increases your chances to reach wayward souls and reconnect. It refutes the world’s emphasis on addictive scrolling and moneymaking and cultivates in-person relationships by using the tools where touchpoints happen.
The Church must remember that a digital presence is seen as an extension of yourself. How you present yourself online creates an impression that is hard to dislodge.
Many parishes have a poor or outdated online presence that does a disservice to the vibrance of the real community.
We see in dioceses and parishes like St. Pius X the new evangelization in action. A creative and vibrant use of the technology at our fingertips, not for personal gain or fame, but for the Gospel.
No more can parishes wait for souls to come to them.
No more can we guarantee that the Faith, a lively faith, will be handed down from one generation to the next.
Parishes must go out. They must take photos and videos, tell stories, and apply digital acumen in order to compete with the billions of dollars and countless hours the secular world pours into winning attention.
“Renew your commitment to nourish Christian hope in social networks and online spaces.” (Pope Leo XIV, Address to Social Media Influencers)
Let’s Collaborate
Your parish can do this. Yellow Line Digital can help!
If your parish wants to start using digital platforms and tools in smart and creative ways, Yellow Line Digital is here to help launch your success.
We collaborate with you to post amazing content that isn’t difficult to create, and we train you to sustainably keep it going long after your engagement with us ends. You can start with our free parish resources.
Check out our St. Mary’s Case Study to see how a thriving parish uses social media effectively.
Let’s get in touch and get started!
Join the conversation! Shoot me an email at mconnors@yellowlinedigital.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
