I began this Easter season at the vigil Mass at a Catholic parish in Northern Virginia that was not my own. I was at another church because I was the confirmation sponsor for a dear friend from college who was entering the Catholic Church after a 47-year spiritual journey that included a nominal Protestant upbringing, a marriage in an Episcopal church, and a decade as a serious Lutheran.
My friend was one of 31 who became Catholic at that Mass, including plenty of newly baptized Christians, Protestants becoming Catholic, and cradle Catholics whose Catholic formation stopped after baptism.
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My own parish, in Falls Church, Virginia, welcomed 25 adults into the church at Easter.
These massive numbers were rivaled in Catholic churches across the country.
The diocese of Duluth in Minnesota saw a 145% increase in new Catholics this Easter. More than 100 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison became Catholics. At Harvard University, 50 new Catholics joined.
The New York Times, after sampling a few American dioceses, estimated a 51% increase in new Catholics this year.
This doesn’t mean the number of Catholics is growing. No, America is still rapidly secularizing — more so, America is unaffiliating or deinstitutionalizing. Religion scholar Ryan Burge has repeatedly pointed out that the number of Catholics keeps falling, down at least 5% over the past 15 years.
Old Catholics are dying, many nominal Catholics are giving up the charade, and many Catholics are crossing the other way across the Tiber into Protestant denominations. But offsetting these losses, in the last couple of years at least, is a real wave of adult converts.
Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate has more granular but slightly older data, which suggest that the number of new adult Catholics every year steadily dropped from 2000 to 2020, but has since reversed. After bottoming out in the lockdown years of 2020 through 2022, the number of new Catholics climbed in 2023 and 2024.
The Pillar, a Catholic publication, crunched more recent numbers in select dioceses and found, for instance, a 50% increase in new Catholics in Washington from 2024 to 2026, a 37% increase in Brooklyn, New York, and massive increases in Newark, New Jersey, from 330 to 1,700, and Philadelphia, from 280 to 1,160.
In the 19th-century Great Awakening, upstate New York was called “the Burned-Over District” because the fire of the Holy Spirit seemed to burn extra hot there. For the 21st-century Catholic Great Awakening, the burned-over district is the Acela Corridor.
While the masses leave the Catholic Church, the elites, it seems, are flocking to it. The Catholic parish with the most buzz these days is St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village, where I was baptized last century. St. Joseph’s has been featured by the New York Times and a handful of other outlets.
What is it about Catholicism that would appeal to young, professional, college-educated adults in the mid-2020s?
Maybe it’s just a passing fashion among conservatives. Maybe becoming Catholic is just cool today, and becoming Orthodox will be cool in 2027. Then maybe in 2028, the Assemblies of God will be the new thing.
Alternatively, maybe the Catholic Church offers something that, while no different from what it has offered for millennia, is particularly needed today.
Consider 2020 and 2021 as the turning point in the trend of adult conversions. Many of the young adults becoming Catholic in the past two years were college or high school students during the pandemic. Some significant part of their formative years was conducted at a distance — isolated, alone, in a room in front of a screen.
This cohort is hungry for the tangible.
In our age of abstract rationalism, Christianity offers a tangible faith. Christianity, after all, tells us that God isn’t just a supreme system operator in the clouds, but He became flesh and came down to live among us.
Catholicism, in particular, is a meaty faith. In the Eucharist, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ are present in a wafer of bread. God is not merely something a Catholic can contemplate, obey, or study. God is Someone we can touch.
Catholics have also never fallen in for the iconoclasm that led some Christian sects to disregard the importance of beauty and art in worship. The Mass, at its best, includes Mozart, incense, and chant, and is held in beautifully built churches whose architecture points the eye and the mind toward Heaven.
Catholic worship is ultimately personal communion with God, but Catholics emphasize that human friendship, and visible, tangible, smellable created beauty can orient our hearts toward the divine.
In addition to being too abstract, our age is also too atomized. Today’s 20-somethings, like the millennials and Gen Xers, were indoctrinated by the Me Generation into a bad hyperindividualistic anthropology that worships autonomy, and tells us all we are the sole authors of ourselves.
The bitter fruits of this worldview have been around for decades, but for today’s young adults, especially the secular or weakly religious elites whose lives have been shaped around workism, mobility, and individual achievement, the error of this way is glaringly obvious.
The Catholic Church offers a different way.
The church tells us that while we are fallen, we are good — and we can be forgiven. It offers up a framework of marriage and parenthood that exalts sacrifice and celebrates mutual self-giving.
For young people who have come up in the world of individualistic and rationalistic transactions, the church offers deep and abiding relations.
Twenty years ago, the secular elites celebrated the decline of Christianity, especially the decline of the prominent and venerable Christian institutions. They saw this as enlightenment and emancipation from systems of oppression and superstition.
Last decade, shrewd observers began to realize that our deinstitutionalization and secularization weren’t making our culture healthier.
These days, as the bursting Easter vigils suggest, folks are seeking a sturdier rock to serve as their life’s foundation.
