By Jay Sorgi • Posted July 23, 2026

Growing up, Sheila Hodges dreamed of running a media company. As God grew her faith and her awareness of the world, that prayer changed slightly.

The young woman whose Catholic faith was molded for years in ministry as a Philadelphia resident and a journalism and communications student at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named the incoming CEO and editor of the Black Catholic Messenger.

She takes over for Nate Tinner-Williams, who founded the Black Catholic Messenger in November 2020 and led the digital news outlet  over the last five and a half years.

“It wasn’t until I dived deeper into my faith when I was like, ‘OK, God, please give me a Catholic media company,’” she said. “I realized that there is a particular gap within Catholic media when it comes to covering the stories of Black Catholics. And so then my prayer changed to ‘God, please give me a Black Catholic media company.”

The 20-something was born in St. Augustine, Florida, the home of the first baptized Black Catholic. She also feels a kinship to recently canonized St. Carlo Acutis, a fellow digital communicator and evangelist, and with the current movement of young adults into the Catholic faith.

I’m particularly elated to be accepting this position within such a phenomenal year for the Church for youth,” she said. “The Holy Spirit is truly moving among the youth in the Church, and so it’s just a blessing to be a part of that wave of new energy.”

Hodges’ resume bursts with an abundance of experience in both leadership and journalism. She wrote for the Daily Pennsylvanian at UPenn as a West Philadelphia beat reporter and served as a communications manager for the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting.

She said the latter role fed her desire to use journalism to help others be present to the stories of marginalized people.

Meanwhile, her life in ministry grew just as powerfully. Hodges became president at the Penn Catholic Newman Center and an undergraduate fellow at the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, which works with both the Penn and Drexel Newman centers.

She served at the Penn Newman Center leading a Bible study with 12 women, and led the first-ever Catholic Bible study for young Black women of high school and college age while she continued to grow in faith at the center. It operates in partnership with St. Agatha-St. James Church in University City.

“It truly is just an incubator for becoming a saint,” she said. “You have a community of brothers who are there who have a particular charism for building community, (and) you have staff who genuinely love and care for the students.”

Hodges advised the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as a senior at Penn on how to best connect with Black Catholics, and she helped plan city-wide Catholic events. She also welcomed to guests of Christ in the City, a lay Catholic organization serving Philadelphia’s unhoused and under resourced people.

This development of her faith led to a bit of an unsettledness in her life, leading her to follow a desire to write about God and to begin what she called a “shift on my resume.”

Hodges worked with Ascension Press as a marketing and public relations contractor as well as an editorial intern, while writing as a Catholic voice with the Penn Epistle, an on-campus Christian publication. Her formation in these years included a Catholic Worldview Fellowship in Germany through Benedictine College.

“I began to feel a bit of peace in my heart, but once again, I still felt a bit unsettled and I was still craving Black representation within Catholic media,” she said.

Hodges graduated with honors from Penn in 2024 and has received a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. She currently lives in Boston, but Philadelphia remains a regular destination for her, both personally to see her sister who lives in Philadelphia and in her faith life.

Leading the Black Catholic Messenger offers her the chance to build bridges that she hopes “bears fruit for the entire Church,” with a goal of collaboration with national outlets like Ascension Press, to be “united in our deep love for Jesus, the Church and tradition.”

“What I would love for Black Catholics to take away from my leadership and just the things I do with the publication is them becoming just very intimately aware of what a gift the Catholic Church is,” she said. “I just hope they see all the love I pour into this publication and into the Black community as being love that’s also just equally poured into the entire mystical body of Christ.”

She sees how Philadelphia’s mix of diversity of race and experience, and diverse experiences of the Catholic faith, has acted as an ideal place for God to pivot her media dream to something more meaningful, powerful and impactful than she initially desired.

“I truly feel like Philadelphia is just such a wonderful place to be a Catholic,” she said. “It truly is just like a well that overflows. Catholics themselves are just so devout and so on fire.”

Hodges feels God using her to merge the skill set she’s built in both journalism and ministry, her background and awareness of a greater need, and her openness to the Lord’s calling.

“I am beyond elated,” she said. “It’s particularly special for me because it truly feels like an answered prayer of mine that I’ve been praying for a very, very long time.”