Bishop leaves lasting impression on TikTok following Confirmation ceremony in Limerick village

THE BISHOP of Killaloe may only have one Limerick parish in his diocese but he has left a lasting impression on it through TikTok.

Bishop Fintan Monahan is one of the very few, perhaps only Irish bishop on TikTok. The social media platform for creating, sharing and discovering short videos has taken the world by storm.

Following the Confirmation of Castleconnell NS pupils, Bishop Monahan made a TikTok video featuring the village, school, Mick Mackey statue, the beautifully decorated church, the pupils making their Confirmation and their creative artwork. It has been well received locally with hundreds upon hundreds of views.

Bishop Monahan (pictured below) agrees that social media and TikTok is a good way of communicating with his flock, keeping in touch with people and identifying with younger people.

“I have been on Twitter and Facebook for over 10 years and it developed into all the different platforms. I expanded into Instagram because it is a very pictorial medium and then onto LinkedIn which is more of a business medium and in recent times You Tube.

“When the pandemic started I began doing little videos to keep in touch with people. I have a fairly extensive You Tube collection - there are over 600 videos on that,” said Bishop Monahan.

In more recent times he has become a TikTok aficionado.

“It is a lovely combination of the visual and music and you can have a nice creative message. It is very responsive compared to the other media. You get a huge amount of interaction and hits on it compared to the other ones – they are static to a degree, just basically your own followers. TikTok is very random – you might get 300 or 400 views in a short space of time whatever way the algorithm shares it,” he explained.

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Bishop Monahan can even go back as far as Bebo, one of the first social networking websites.

“Bebo is the original one and then once the older folk gravitated onto that younger folk went to Facebook and then once older folk went onto Facebook younger people went onto Snapchat. They keep migrating.

“Once the parents and grandparents follow them they move onto something else. It is amazing how it becomes an older age group very rapidly. TikTok happens to be the relatively younger one at the moment but you can be sure they are already working out new platforms!” said Bishop Monahan, who encourages his priests to have more social media interaction.

“Absolutely. We have had encouragement courses and for parishes to have Facebook pages. During Covid that came on in leaps and bounds. A huge number of parishes did get into Facebook live and webcams and also different video messaging. A huge number embraced it.

“A lot have eased off it now that we are back to meeting in reality but it is still there as a permanent feature. We have a nice combination now of having online and real meetings – the hybrid reality is very much here to stay,” said Bishop Monahan, who will continue to spread his message from the pulpit and on TikTok.