Courtesy of Openlight Media
Sister Miriam Holzman doesn’t consider herself a content creator, but does believe the viral TikToks of her podcast are divinely ordained.
“The Lord put me in this spot, and I'm here for the ride,” she said of her newfound online stardom for vertical video clips of her laughter-filled interviews with sisters about their faith and hobbies, titled with social media-friendly thumbnails. Commenters praise the sisters for radiating “joy and peace” and being “lowkey fire” with “aura” on one post with 5.8 million views, in which the sisters discuss a sister who “gave up” driving over the speed limit for Lent.
While President Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV online and posted (and then deleted) a photo depicting himself as Jesus that drew backlash from the religious right this week, the sisters of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, have taken a decidedly different tone to spread the faith.
It’s yet another demonstration of how creators have transformed every facet of society, even religion and evangelism. The sisters take content seriously, the latest example of Catholic content reaching millions online and the growing significance online of religious influencers. As my incredible colleague Shane O’Neill reported earlier this month, Catholicism is having a moment online, particularly with Gen Z men. Even the Vatican hosted a creator summit, featuring the pope himself.
I first came across the sisters when I saw one of their most popular clips – a TikTok of Sister Miriam praising another sister’s ultimate frisbee skills – and I reached out to their production company Openlight Media before even launching this newsletter.
“Sister, and you are so good at that,” Sister Miriam said in the video, a one-liner that was widely shared online and re-created in lipsync videos.
Phrases like “Sister, yes!” and “Sister, you are so not a boring personality,” have also taken off – though not at the same level as the frisbee line. The church’s lingo is surprisingly primed for online virality given its overlapping vocab with slang terms such as “mother” and “sister.” Commenters say them referring to each other as “sister” is “such a slay” and say they have adopted their phrasing as a new “vocal stim.” Others have obsessed over the community title of “motherhouse,” where Sister Miriam lives, which Sister John Dominic Rasmussen, the executive director of Openlight Media, said she had heard people mistakenly label “the mothership.”
Given that they don’t use social media themselves, the sisters only know how the show performs when they get feedback from the production team or if word gets around to their broader social circles. Like many podcast hosts, they also record multiple episodes back-to-back for efficiency – often capitalizing on when sisters are visiting during Easter and Christmas – and they often create the buzziest clips during a speed round section of the interviews, where questions veer from faith to less pious topics, like hobbies.
When Sister Miriam was informed of the “Sister, and you are so good at that” video’s popularity (it hit 2.6 million views on TikTok), all she remembered of the episode clip was that it included the guest sister calling her out for chatting on the field while playing frisbee. Now, she said the sisters tease her by telling her she is “so good at that” when she is doing something well.
“I was surprised, because for us it's such a normal way to talk to one another – to be uplifting and affirming – and I love giving shout-outs to my sister when I see that she's awesome at something,” she recalled. “I was kind of thinking, really, that one? But okay, I’m glad that it’s a positive and uplifting phrase that people can hold on to and hopefully use.”
The TikTok account has since started posting other content of the sisters, such as a video of them actually playing ultimate frisbee and another of them singing (comments compared it to Coachella and read “I’m one minor inconvenience away from becoming a nun”). “Girlhood comes in all forms,” reads one comment with more than 200,000 likes. “I’m literally one situationship away from this,” reads another with more than 50,000 likes.
While the sisters don’t list conversion or recruitment as an explicit goal, Sister John Dominic referred to the podcast as a potential “first step” that could “mature and nurture and grow” with human interaction, such as a coffee shop gathering to discuss the show.
Sister Miriam carries in her pocket a printed comment from one of the videos where a 21-year-old wrote that “she stopped believing, but then she started getting the TikToks in her feed, and she said it brought her back to her faith.”
“My greatest desire is that the people will know our Lord and know his love, and he's seeking them out. He's seeking after this girl – the Father, God the Father, in unusual ways, who would have thought through TikTok?” she exclaimed. “But he does that!”
This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by Washington Post Creator, a new business outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.
