“The Catholic Dating Show” recently launched on CatholicMatch, a Catholic dating site, and has quickly become a fan favorite. / Credit: CatholicMatch/Tony Tibbetts
CNA Staff, Dec 13, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Secular dating shows like “The Bachelor,” “Farmer Wants a Wife,” and “Love Is Blind” are among a plethora of programs that aim to bring singles together. But what would it look like to add faith to matchmaking in a dating show? CatholicMatch, one of the first Catholic dating sites, seeks to do just that with the launch of “The Catholic Dating Show.”
Earlier this year, CatholicMatch released a new platform called “Relate.” This platform is meant to bring users together for weekly live, virtual events such as trivia nights, discussions with prominent Catholic speakers, and “The Catholic Dating Show.”
The show has quickly become a fan favorite, bringing in over 600 live viewers through the dating site and even more when it is uploaded to CatholicMatch’s YouTube channel the next day for nonmembers to watch.
Taking place two Saturdays a month, “The Catholic Dating Show” is an hourlong event that features one single woman and three single men. During the first half of the show, the woman asks her suitors questions to get to know them better. The three men also have their cameras off for this part so the woman cannot see them.
Once she is done asking questions, the live audience lets her know, via a live poll, whom they think she should continue with into the second half of the show. She can either take their advice or not. Once she picks one of the three suitors, the two go on to play compatibility games to get to know each other further. The show finishes with another live poll from the audience asking if the two should meet in person for a date.
“It’s just been so much fun,” Tony Tibbetts, live events manager at CatholicMatch and the host of the dating show, told CNA in an interview. “We’re having a blast and people love it.”
Tibbetts pointed out that through the Relate platform, CatholicMatch is not only trying to address a singleness epidemic but “also a loneliness epidemic.”
As someone who works with Catholic singles on a daily basis, Tibbetts shared that he is witnessing that “there’s a great sense of distrust in the world and the feeling of you’re going to get burned” and “that lack of vulnerability has become very rampant in the Catholic community when it comes to Catholic dating.”
Due to this, CatholicMatch is working to be more than just a dating app but also to “build something unique in the dating world, especially with this Relate platform — to not only be the name you think of when you think of Catholic online dating, but it will also be something that people desire to be part of.”
“So we’re helping people to be able to join in the Catholic community — because we all need community — of singles and who knows, maybe you just might find ‘the one’ while you’re there,” he explained.
He added: “Our stated mission is to help facilitate as many holy, Catholic marriages as possible, and so we want to do that for you as quickly as possible, as quickly as we can, but while you’re on it as well, we want you to get the most out of your dating experience. Dating should be fun. Dating shouldn’t be stressful … We want to help facilitate that joy in people and that excitement for community, for possibly finding other people like you, for possibly finding ‘the one.’”
Through the live events, Tibbetts said he believes CatholicMatch is enabling users to “go beyond the profile of somebody to be able to get to know them.”
One of their newest additions to the Relate platform is the dating hotline, which allows users to call in with questions about dating or ask for advice and have their questions answered live by the male and female hosts.
Tibbetts said the primary goal is “trying to facilitate joy among Catholic singles.”
“With that, we hope and pray that the Lord will move something within them where we can create marriages, we can create holy, Catholic relationships with it … We’re trying to create joyful lives for Catholics and hopefully create some Catholic marriages along the way.”
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