Franciscan student becomes catholic media sensation

From a little town near Cleveland hails Renee Shumay who is more than just a little well known. Indeed, she has become a mini-celebrity on catholic social media and among her peers at Franciscan University of Steubenville where she attends as a junior.

While she majors in journalism she is well known for her YouTube videos. Her interest in video recording started as a little girl who liked to film skits with her siblings and neighbors on an old vhs shoulder camera her father gave her.

Roughly 250 videos later she is the head and founder of New Catholic Generation.New Catholic Generation is a collaboration of catholic teens on YouTube who speak out about the faith and evangelize by recording and sharing video blogs, commonly known as vlogs.

Originally Shumay had a web forum at age 11, and then she started an anonymous blog in high school, before starting up her own YouTube channel.

She said her classes in high school were in the Socratic style where a lot of discussion took place, but that she was more the quiet type, and so she used the blog as an outlet for her thoughts.

“I wanted to talk to people in my high school about serious issues they were dealing with without having to break the silly and sarcastic persona they knew me for,” she said.

In 2011 she started her YouTube channel Reborn Pure. Her first video was her reading a blurb about what faith meant to her.

She got the idea for the name because her first name, Renee, means rebirth and her middle name, Catherine, means pure, she said.

Shumay’s father is Ukrainian Catholic, and on holidays they would attend the Divine Liturgy at the nearby Ukrainian church. Her most popular video is about the Divine Liturgy and has 55,000 views.

While Shumay was online making YouTube videos, she did not see a presence from other teens.She said, “I wanted to show others teens that there were catholic teens out there like them because I couldn’t find any other ones on YouTube.”

In 2012 with this in mind she created a blogspot page that listed the names of catholic teens that had YouTube channels. She said she didn’t want them to be discouraged with little views and this was a place they could all come together for one audience.

With another vlogger, who is now a Dominican nun, they spread the word about it and inspired others to join.“Six YouTubers left their channels to shadow religious orders, and four of those took the vows,” she said.

Eventually NCG grew and there are currently around 60 vloggers involved. Renee and two fellow vloggers, David Macdonald and Joseph Palmer, who also attended Franciscan University of Steubenville, previously had made cameos in each other’s videos.

She said she wanted to do something big involving all of them since they were all together. Out of this the official New Catholic Generation YouTube channel was born on January 1 2016. The channel has skits, catholics reacting to videos, and news blurbs from Renee herself.

When Catholic Memes’ Facebook page shared New Catholic Generation’s first video for the new channel titled “13 Sins that Aren’t Actually Sins” their views increased and the video itself has 21,000 views.

Then after the 2016 March For Life in January where pro-lifers, including Franciscan students, got stuck on the PA turnpike for 32 hours, Shumay decided to record a video about it and this video went viral.

Without being advertised by Shumay it was suddenly being passed around online when the official March for Life Facebook page shared it.

The unedited video (which they originally shared) has 3,000 views and the edited version has 11,000 views.

Shumay has connections with Catholic Memes, Catholic-Link, and Catholic Gag, all of whom are social media presences.

Shumay’s next big goal is to unite the different catholic social media organizations. She said, “Every network seems like it's working for its own benefit and gain and not together.”

She said that the main reason these small blogs and vlogs run by catholic teens were not being seen was because of the bigger organizations that were only focused on promoting themselves.

Shumay said, “The main goal of NCG when I started it was for the church to see and hear its youth more than ever before.”

Eventually she wants it to be independently run by hundreds of catholic teens from all over the world.New Catholic Generation vloggers have combined views of over 1.2 million.

This success Shumay contributes to all the small blogs and channels New Catholic Generation was able to promote and give “to an audience that had been actually looking for them the whole time.”

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