Italian Priest Who Left on His Facebook AR Filter During Service Just Reinvented the Catholicism Game

Source - An Italian priest's live streamed mass on Facebook went viral after the religious leader accidentally left the platform's AR filters active, causing him to appear in various cartoon disguises.

Paolo Longo, parish priest of the Church of San Pietro and San Benedetto di Polla in Salerno province, live streamed mass on Facebook to allow parishioners to attend the service virtually amid the coronavirus outbreak.

I don't know about other faiths, but Catholic Mass is not like a One Size Fits All thing. For instance, my son is a traditionalist who likes Latin Mass. Our parish is more of a crap shoot. Like one of those nerd fan crates you get delivered every month, you never know what you're getting until you walk in. Depending on which priest is on duty, it can be a lot of laughs or a slog where time stands still. 

But regardless of how you prefer your weekly hour of getting-right-with-God-brah, you have to consider that Father Longo might be onto something. Attendance is down. It's getting harder to get teenagers to show up. Priests are in short supply. Churches are consolidating when they're not closing down altogether. And he might have just come up with the solution. By accident. Like the way Alexander Graham Bell's assistant plucked a wire by mistake and got the first phone to work. 

Augmemted reality. This is how you get the generation that grew up on Snap and Tik Tok into the church. Not by reading Scripture to reveal the Word of God. But with 30 second videos with cartoon effects. With balloons and fireworks, puppy faces and Optimus Prime helmets, black hats and "Deal with it" glasses. Followed by the next logical steps of The Nicene Creed told entirely in emojis and influencers lip-syncing the Gospel reading. Problems. Solved. 

Allow me to introduce our next pontiff, who'll save the Church and bring it into the rest of the millennium, His Holiness Pope Paolo I.