The Catholic world on Facebook suffered a jolt during the last 24 hours when more than 20 Catholic pages, some with millions of followers, were blocked for unknown reasons.

The Catholic News Agency (CNA) is reporting on the incident which impacted 21 Brazil-based pages and four English-language pages. For example, Papa Francisco Brasil, which has 3.8 million likes, was shut down. Father Rocky’s page, with 3.5 million likes, was closed, along with Catholic and Proud which had six million likes and Jesus and Mary which has 1.7 million likes.

Godwin Delali Adadzie, the page administrator for the Jesus and Mary page, told CNA he was on Facebook at around 8:00 p.m. central time on Monday when he was asked to upload a photo of himself because his personal Facebook account was “suspected of suspicious activity.”

“This page is the joy of my apologetics ministry online. It is like the digital heartbeat of my ministry,” Adadzie told ChurchPOP.

The Ghana-based Catholic is a popular blogger and used his Facebook page to share his articles.

“The page happens to be the most effective means of driving traffic to my Catholic websites and blogs.”

The shutdown was very disturbing and not only affected him, but all of the admins for the account experienced the same problem. They were all told their personal accounts were “suspected of suspicious activity” and had to upload photos for verification.

Beth Racine, Director of Communications for the Central Association of the Miraculous Medal, which operates the Shrine of the Miraculous Medal in Philadelphia, had the same problem on Monday night.

“I was asked to send them a picture because of suspected suspicious activity. I didn’t know if it had anything to do with the Shrine’s page, the Mary’s Miraculous Medal Family, except that every admin working at the Shrine had the same problem of not being able to get into their personal Facebook accounts.," Racine said.

The Mary’s Miraculous Medal Family page was never shut down in the incident but some of the admins were still trying to get their accounts back up and running yesterday.

“Some news articles were blaming Facebook for pulling the pages but I wonder if something like this might have been triggered by someone who has anti-Catholic sentiments,” she added. “If there are a lot of complaints on a page in a short amount of time, Facebook’s algorithms trigger an automatic screening of the account.”

Others, however, are suspicious because of the 2016 incident in which Facebook was allegedly censoring trends that seemed to be too conservative. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rejected those allegations and even met with conservative U.S. leaders to reassure them that Facebook was a neutral operation.

They have yet to respond to this latest dust-up. As of this writing, Facebook has not offered an explanation for what happened; nor have they explained why most of the sites have since been restored. Owners were given no notice that their accounts were once again online and only discovered this after periodically checking their accounts.

The incident has some wondering if Catholics need to think beyond Facebook.

“I think all the affected pages’ owners need to meet and plan an alternative solution,” Adadzie said. “We are a Church of over 1.1 billion people and we can come up with a better solution.”

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