Alberto Ravagnani

Alberto Ravagnani (born 1993) is an Italian social media personality and former Catholic priest. He became known for his decision to renounce the priesthood due to disagreements over the church's celibacy rule for clergy members.

Early life Ravagnani was born in 1993 in Monza, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. His father was a warehouse worker and his mother was a cook. He wrote in his autobiography, published in 2026, about how he condemned his classmates at school, had a pornography addiction as a teenager and was not shown much affection through his childhood. before later moving to San Gottardo in Corte in Milan. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he started a YouTube channel, where he quickly gained over 75,000 subscribers by July 2020. Ravagnani was also a speaker at the Jubilee of Catholic Digital Missionaries and Influencers held in Rome in June 2025.

Departure from the priesthood In January 2026, Ravagnani announced that he would stand down as a priest, citing his main reason for doing so as his disagreement with the Church's celibacy rules, which require ordained members of the Church to abstain from marriage and sexual activity. In an interview with Triple J Hack, that throughout his priesthood, he struggled with remaining celibate, and that he desired a relationship. He stated, "I think we don't have to demonise having sex and try to feel pleasure about giving love and receiving love."

He wrote an autobiography about his experiences with priesthood and social media fandom, titled La Scelta . Ravagnani is encouraging the church to reconsider its stances on celibacy and to be more inclusive.