This Easter, the University of Notre Dame saw a record number of students enter the Catholic Church. This trend is happening not just at Notre Dame but around the country. Los Angeles welcomed more than 5,500 new Catholics. The New York Post ran an essay entitled “Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse [. . .]” As reporter Matthew McDonald wrote in another article, “Dioceses are reporting increases of 30%, 40%, 50% and even more than 70%.”
Not just in the United States but around the world, a growing number of adults—mostly young adults—joined the Church. In Austria, there was an 85 percent increase in the number of adult baptisms. In his essay “Adult Baptisms: What’s Driving the Rise?,” Luke Coppen reports large increases in Belgium, Canada, and Mongolia. Catholic conversions are also rising in Kosovo. In Sweden, the Catholic Church is growing, again with young adult converts. The Washington Times reported, “France sees a record surge in conversions to Catholicism.” In England, another article noted that it is “the young converts leading Catholicism’s UK comeback.”
Some people think that the COVID pandemic explains this massive surge in young people joining (or rejoining) the Catholic Church. As Yale Professor Nicholas A. Christakis explains, “Usually what happens in times of plague is people get more religious. I mean, this has been observed for thousands of years. They get more abstemious; they stop spending money; they get risk-averse; they adopt a whole set of behaviors like that. And then when the plague is behind them, they do the reverse. Religion now declines.” In May 2023, the World Health Organization declared an end to the pandemic. So, what one would expect in 2025 is a decrease in conversions, rather than what is actually found: a great increase in people joining the Church.
What has drawn so great a number of young people to conversion? Each person’s story is unique, but recent converts often share common paths. Many of them have been influenced by winsome and intelligent online presentations of the Catholic faith from people like Trent Horn of Catholic Answers, Dr. Scott Hahn of the St. Paul Center, and of course Bishop Robert Barron at Word on Fire. They don’t present a dumbed-down Catholicism incapable of answering the questions of today’s young adults.
Although many people begin their journey to the Church online, the destination is personal, concrete, and incarnational.
Another recurring pattern is the power of beauty in prompting conversions and reversions. What could be more beautiful and moving than Holy Week celebrations in the Vatican with the pope? I had the chance to do this in 1991 with Pope St. John Paul II. It was absolutely spectacular, stunningly beautiful, and deeply moving. I assumed there would never be anything to surpass it. I was wrong.
This year, I got to celebrate Holy Week at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame from Palm Sunday through Easter Vespers. If you want to go to the Easter Vigil, you need to wait in a long line. The Vigil begins at 9:00 p.m., but the doors open at 7:00 p.m. So, eager students began lining up for a prime seat in the Basilica at 5:45. That is, 5:45 a.m., more than fifteen hours before the service began. That is enthusiasm in the root sense of the term.
What made Holy Week at Notre Dame so beautiful? The choir singing Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater would melt the heart of the abominable snowman. The gradual extinguishing of all lights in the Tenebrae service with the thunderous strepitus in total darkness made me feel the power of infernal forces.
But the most beautiful part of Holy Week for me came during the Easter Vigil. We witnessed the baptism of twenty-three students. After they were baptized, the congregation gave them an ovation of thunderous applause lasting, it seemed, three or four minutes.
As recent convert Sydney Johnston put it, “There’s just something so beautiful and transcendent about the rituals and the ancient history in the Catholic Mass that’s been preserved. . . . The church really communicates a degree of reverence that I didn’t find in the more liberal, laissez-faire approach of nondenominational churches.” Although many people begin their journey to the Church online, the destination is personal, concrete, and incarnational.
The Church is in a prime position to supply what is lacking in today’s culture. As Professor Jeffrey Pojanowski pointed out:
In a disembodied time, [the Church] is resolutely concrete: the splash of holy water, the smear of oil, the pinch of exorcising salt, the smell of incense, the quiet voice of absolution in your ear, the gentle slap of confirmation, Blaise’s candles on your throat, the laying on—or grasp—of hands, the gentle ache of the knees at consecration, the weird, withered relic of a saint, and, of course, the taste of bread and wine that are, mysteriously, His flesh and blood—suffering embraced and given loving meaning. This revolution will not be digitized.
As so many young people around the world have recently discovered, the Church offers what cannot be found anywhere else.