♱⟡˙⋆This piece is a part of HAGIOGRAPHY, a digital collection of works by Guest Curator Arianna Muñoz. HAGIOGRAPHY explores the concept of the virginal, martyred girl-saint - why are we drawn to the aestheticised ‘sad girl’? Who gets the ‘privilege’ of performing this girl-saint role, and how do those outside that ideal reject or challenge it? ⋆˙⟡ ♱
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Imagine crucifixes, pearly rosary beads, flowing dark hair covered in a lacy veil, praying in front of a picturesque background of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. For the past few years, Catholicism has sparked interest among social media users, particularly those on TikTok who are curious about trying a new aesthetic. Just go on TikTok and search up #CatholicCore, and you will find hundreds of videos admiring gothic churches with their wide arches and stained glass windows.
There is another side to this aestheticization. Some aren’t romanticizing the religion, but a specific kind of person: the Catholic Latina. When thinking of the Catholic Latina, you might conjure an image of a girl dressed in white, wearing a ribbon-held braid, clutching roses. While admiring the beautiful and pleasing aspects of Catholicism isn’t bad by any means, I do think it is problematic to use this as a fashion trend or aspiration without understanding the history or context in which these things happened.
Catholicism’s aesthetics have been on the rise since the 2018 Met Gala’s “Heavenly Bodies” theme saw several stars dressed in luxurious pope-inspired robes and gowns decorated in religious iconography. 2025 was all abuzz with the papal conclave, especially since it came just a few months after the popular 2024 movie Conclave starring Ralph Fiennes. Social media’s CatholicCore is another manifestation of the youth’s interest in religious styles. In May 2024, Dior released its Cruise Collection, styling their models in black and white dresses, with braids styled in red threads that imitated Indigenous Latin American hairstyles. As Melanie Hernandez states in her article, “Catholic inspired trends flourish at the expense of Mexican culture” from the North Texas Daily, “the hair and the location all come together to set the scene and push a specific image.”
What can we make of aesthetisizing a certain woman? Before we don ourselves in virginal white and light our room with candles, let’s remember how Catholicism came to Latin America—through colonialism.
The Spanish colonized Latin America in the 15th century up to the early 19th century; centuries of torture, subjugation, and bloody horror. Indigenous women, especially, were violated in every sense of the word, and so were their children. Religion was forced onto them, and thousands were killed or tortured if they chose not to comply.
People adopt these trendy aesthetics, unaware of their origins or choosing to overlook them. While it is not wrong to find these visual pieces appealing, there is an issue with romanticizing a “Catholic” Latina. Social media narrowly portrays this aspect of Latinidad. Catholicism is complex and broad, just as Latin American identity is, which should not be defined by a subcategory of fashion aesthetics that will leave just as quickly as they came. Being a “Catholic Latina” is not just about wearing a prayer veil and lace. Maybe this aesthetic should be titled “Catholic Fantasy Core.”
Latinas have commonly been the subject of stereotypes and fetishization in the media for decades. The Catholic Latina trope becomes unsettling when considering how the “pure girl” trope might fit into this, leading to more sexualization and even infantilization with aestheticizing “innocence.” People who are trying to emulate this aesthetic should ask themselves whether they are doing so to appease a certain audience or if they are willing to understand the origins of these aesthetics. Using religious iconography and components such as rosaries is not the same as wearing leg warmers or punk fashion.
We should always be mindful when using aspects of different cultures as fashion pieces. Catholicism has been a subject of intrigue for centuries, and that most likely won’t stop any time soon. But what we should understand is that aestheticizing a Catholic Latina is actually aestheticizing a fantasy built on stereotypes and unacknowledged history. While I don’t think wearing crucifixes and rosary beads is necessarily wrong, maybe we shouldn’t assign a specific race to the aesthetic. Again, maybe #CatholicFantasyCore would be better, although I’m not sure that rolls off the tongue so easily. I’m sure the internet would find a way to make that sound cuter.
To write this essay, I had an interesting talk with one of my friends, who also happens to be a Catholic and Latina. She had this to say about the topic: “Churning Catholicism into an aesthetic on social media leads to stripping away of substance and nuance in favor of short attention spans and social media engagement that are not conducive to long-form learning and discourse.”
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ABOUT THE ART: Las que no sangran (hagiografía doméstica) is a series of macro photographs of small devotional Virgin figurines collected through gifts and travels. Isolated against a generic, sky-like background, these objects are removed from liturgical space and re-situated within an intimate domestic archive. The work reflects on contemporary forms of devotion and femininity, where sanctity appears stripped of miracle and transcendence, grounded instead in repetition, care, and persistence. The figures, instead of bleeding or suffering, become enduring personal symbols. Functioning as minor relics of affective memory, they propose a personal hagiography shaped by daily ritual rather than institutional faith.
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WRITER BIO: Paula Milian is a college junior based in northern New Jersey. She loves musing about romance and music on her laptop keyboard. When she is not writing, you can find her eating pastries, enjoying anime, and listening to a lotta jazz! Her work has been featured in the Montclarion, Girls Write Now 2025 Anthology, Apricus Literary, and Sonder Literary. IG @umpaula_05ARTIST BIO: Cristina Moreno García (Zaragoza, ES, 1985) is a visual artist and researcher whose practice moves between video, installation, sound and writing, exploring memory as a corporal, affective and political archive. Her work often engages with devotional gestures, ritual, vulnerability and the aesthetics of belief, examining how collective imaginaries of suffering, femininity and transcendence are inscribed on bodies and images. She studied Fine Arts in Cuenca, Valencia and Nuremberg, and received the Goldrausch Grant for women artists in Berlin in 2013. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid). Between 2014 and 2016 she co-directed Vesselroom Project (Berlin), a platform for artistic exchange, editorial practice and public programming. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a curator and cultural worker. Her current research focuses on contemporary spirituality, pilgrimage, embodied archives and the persistence of Catholic visual culture in post-secular imaginaries. IG @cmgarcia_
This article rightly highlights the girl-saint as an aesthetic and social construction. Reading it, I can’t help thinking of Dolce & Gabbana, which has turned Catholic imagery into a spectacle of luxury : magnified, eroticised, and emptied of its historical weight. Where religion is still lived by some women as constraint or inherited burden, others are able to wear it as a glamorous costume. It is this gap, this question of privilege, that makes Catholic core so troubling today.