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Catholic conversions are SURGING this year! But does that mean we’re in a revival in the US? The numbers are a little more nuanced than you may first expect…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’ve got a lot of exciting news for you, not least of which is we’re ending the season of Lent and entering the season called Trudiwum, the shortest season on the church’s calendar. Fun fact, it’s the three holiest days of the year. It begins with tonight, Holy Thursday, the mass of the Lord’s Supper, and it’s going to culminate in the Easter vigil. But at the Easter vigil, a lot of people are going to be entering the Catholic Church this year. And so I want to continue to ask a question I started to ask last year, namely, do we see the seeds or the early signs of a Catholic revival in America? Now, when I asked that question last year, we were starting to see some pretty interesting trends. And as we’re going to see, those trends have continued and in fact seem to have be even improving.
But I also want to be cognizant of the pushback the revival narrative has gotten, and quite reasonably. There are some people who, not just because they hate joy, because they respect facts, want to say, yes, there are these positive signs, but there are these negative signs as well. There are plenty of people in the young generation, particularly who are just clearly less religious than the generations before. So we don’t want to paint an overly simplistic narrative. So I want to identify what are the real sources of good news? What are the grounds upon which we can say something does seem to be happening? And then what are the limits on that? Because we don’t want to exaggerate the kind of story. So the first question to ask is just, well, are Catholic conversions really up? And there are a lot of indications that the answer to that is yes, including looking at different diocese record keeping year to year at the Easter Vigil.
So this has been making the news both in Catholic spaces and in secular spaces, because it’s enough of a phenomenon that people are starting to notice. And this is true in Catholicism specifically. We’re seeing evidence of this in the US and in the UK and elsewhere. We also are finding broader trends of just people entering Christianity at what appears to be higher rates. I want to look at a couple of the Catholic specific things, partly because it’s a little easier to get Catholic data because it’s gathered diocese by diocese in one place. It’s still actually not that easy to find the data, but it’s easier. So the Catholic Register points out that we are seeing these trends all over the place. And they put together a list of the Diocese that were showing the biggest year over year spikes in converts. So the number of people coming into the church in 2026, compared even to 2025, a year that was already up for a lot of places, they found places like Norange, Connecticut.
The number of people coming into the church is up 112%, Pueblo, Colorado, 105% year over year, all the way down to Springfield, Cape Girard, a 54% increase. These are some pretty massive surges in the number, but the question with even a term like surge or spike is, is this just a blip? Are we just dealing with a small number of people so that even a little bit of an increase is going to be statistically significant? Well, it seems bigger than that. And this has attracted the attention of places like the New York Times. They had a recent article called Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts, and they point out that bishops are struggling to understand why this is happening. And they put some numbers with it where it’s not just a percentage increase, but you can see pretty concretely that across the country, there does seem to be some pretty tremendous growth.
So for instance, this Easter, the Archdiocese of Detroit, is going to receive 1,428 new Catholics in the church, which is the highest number in 21 years. Galveston Houston will have the most converts in 15 years, Diocese of Des Moines, it’s gone up 51% from 265 people to 400 people, just year over year. And then they point out, this can be a little tricky to do because you’re going diocese by diocese trying to find out what the numbers are. Every diocese has their own kind of system for tracking these things, so it can be very hard to get just good, reliable data. And I would also add that it’s perfectly legitimate to say diocese who are doing well may be more likely to want to share their information. Also, dioceses that are doing well may also be better at record keeping. It might just be a sign of a functional competent diocese where diocese that can’t even figure out how many people are coming into the church that may be an indication of a deeper spiritual malaise.
Either way, with those kind of caveats, what the New York Times found is that looking at two dozen dioceses, including some of the largest ones like LA and Phoenix, Los Angeles is the largest Catholic diocese in the country, but also looking at rural and smaller diocese like Gallup New Mexico and Allentown, Pennsylvania, everyone that they looked at showed a significant jump in converse. So this doesn’t seem to be a regional phenomenon. It doesn’t seem to be just a random blip. Something seems to be happening. And one theory is, well, we’d clearly lost a lot of people during COVID. Whatever growth we were experiencing was dramatically reversed and then some. And so maybe we’re just kind of making up lost ground. And there’s probably some truth to that. But as Elizabeth Diaz points out in this piece in the Times, in many cases, we’re going beyond the COVID dip.
So for instance, in Philadelphia, the new total is double what it was in 2017 in terms of new converts. Think about that. It’s not just better year over year. Going all the way back nine years, before COVID, before any of the more recent disruptions, we’re seeing twice as many people coming into the church in Philly. Similarly, in Newark, 1701 people are going to join this Easter compared to a thousand in 2010. So that’s clearly some evidence at a local, like a diocesan level that something seems to be happening. And we’re seeing this happen in enough places that there really does seem to be something afoot. There is this well-documented broader national trend, not of a revival per se, but of a kind of stabilization, a healthy plateau. When I say healthy plateau, I don’t mean that this is good. I just mean the bad news isn’t getting worse.
So as Diaz points out, the broader Christian population in the US has been stable for several years after years of decline, according to Pew research. And we’re going to see some other research that is actually even higher quality in terms of seeing, yeah, there’s a stabilization and some signs that things might be moving back in the right direction from a religious perspective. So just to kind of flag this, I would say we are seeing early signs of what might be an authentic revival, but it’s too soon to just label it that. And I’ll explain why that is in a second. But in addition to the New York Times taking notice, the Atlantic also did, they had an article called The Real Religious Renewal Happening in Gen Z by Luis Porales, and they’re looking at these anecdotal stories and also putting them in the broader political science context just to see, well, is this real?
Because it’s possible, maybe your church is growing. Maybe more people are moving into your neighborhood. So your church is on fire right now. Tons of young people are moving into the area. Tons of young people are starting to go to your church, but the overall city and country and globe isn’t the same story. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. Here’s what we find. First, we really are seeing an increase around college campuses. So conversions do appear to be going up in big cities and in college campuses amongst young professionals, and Luis Perales tracks down a lot of the campus data, just as we saw from the New York Times, a lot of the diocesan data. So for instance, this Easter at Harvard, nearly 50 students plan to join the Catholic Church through the school’s Catholic Center, which is about double from last year. Arizona State, about 50 planned to join this spring, also about double from last year, University of Michigan, 40 compared to 30 last year.
Now, I will just add anecdotally that in talking to chaplains at Catholic colleges, particularly across the Midwest, I’m hearing these stories as well. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are saying, “This is the biggest OCIA class I’ve seen in my time as a chaplain at whatever university.” So this doesn’t appear to me to be cherry-picked data. Again, there are going to be certain kind of built-in maybe biases or parameters we have to be careful of. For instance, when I’m speaking at a university, this is a sign that they’re invested in bringing a Catholic speaker to the university. The ones that are really lukewarm maybe aren’t even doing that. And so the fact that I’m seeing signs of life is on the one hand really good because I think there really is something there. On the other hand, we do want to be careful, at least at the outset of trying to draw too much from some positive news.
But it’s not just diocese across the country, it’s not just Catholic campuses across the country. We also see in cities something similar happening as well. And so as Perales says, many New York City parishes likewise expect far more converts than usual this Easter. Nearly 90 people will formerly join the Catholic Church at St. Joseph’s more than double the number from last year. As a Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, 70 are going to join nearly double from last year. Now, that is just part of the story. And I know that’s a ton of data, but I give all of this data to say this isn’t just somebody said, “I noticed there’s a lot of young people here and I didn’t notice that last year.” No, no, we actually have some numbers to put on this and these numbers seem to be pointing in a positive direction, but they’re still pretty piecemeal, pretty incomplete, and we’re going to give bigger numbers in a minute here.
But there’s a qualitative dimension to this as well. It’s not just quantitative. And this is one of the things I thought that the Atlantic article did a really good job of covering is that conversion numbers are just one indication of spiritual engagement. You could have a ton of people join and be lukewarm and not really have their lives transformed in a meaningful way, but that isn’t what appears to be happening. And so they interviewed Bailey Burke, a coordinator for the St. Mary’s student parish in Ann Arbor, and she described seeing greater devotional interests. And again, this tracks with a lot of the anecdotal stuff that I’ve seen and a lot of the anecdotal stuff that I’ve been hearing as well. So she was finding that at the University of Michigan, more of the students are signing up for overnight retreats and applying to the parishes post-grad service fellowship.
They also see more interest in prayer. They’ve recently increased the amount of Eucharistic adoration from two nights a week to four nights a week, a small group of students have begun praying a daily rosary, et cetera. So all of this is to say you’ve got all these scattered data points that are not very well organized that do kind of look like there’s the seeds of a revival going on. And a lot of people have been quick to go ahead and just declare it a revival, including the President of the United States.
CLIP:
I’m very proud to say that during my time in office, both the first four years, and in particular this last year, there has been a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity, and belief in God.
Joe:
But political scientists like Ryan Burge have pushed back on this and they’ve said basically, hold your horses, you’re making too much of too little and the data doesn’t really support the broad kind of revival narrative. And so I want to engage with this directly because I think Burge is right about a lot of this, but it may be a little more optimistic than the picture he’s painted. Now, if you’re not familiar, he is a political scientist. He was also until, I believe 2024, the pastor of a Baptist church, and that church eventually closed. So he’s done a lot of good work on this and is coming at this from something of the perspective of a religious insider who’s also wanting to just be as fair as he can be in his terms, just calling the balls and strikes. So if you’re familiar with the work of Steven Bullevant in the UK, Ryan Burge is kind of the American Steven Bullevant in some ways.
And so a way to pose the question that he presents is, are we looking at a revival or just a plateau? Because his argument is the young generation is clearly less religious than say the oldest generations. So are we actually seeing this resurgence of like a really religious young generation or are we just seeing that the religious hemorrhaging that we’d been seeing for decades has flatlined? And so things are just not getting worse at a faster rate. Here’s how he kind of presents the argument against a religious revival. And then we’ll look at some more data, including from Ryan Burge himself, to sort of complicate the picture.
CLIP:
There is some data that says that at least that the vibes are on Christianity have increased, but numerically speaking, in terms of revival, that’s not true. The share of Americans who are Christians declined from 90% in the 1970s to about 63% now, and the share of the nuns have risen from 5% to about 28, 29, 30% in the last couple, since 1972 to 2020. What you’re seeing though in the data is a pause in the decline of Christianity and a pause in the rise of the nuns. Since COVID, we’ve really sort of had a stasis, a plateau, a waiting period, but that’s not revival. Revival would be a significant increase in the share of Americans who identify as Christians or go to church on a regular basis or religious importance or a significant decline in atheists or agnostics. And we’ve seen none of those things.
Joe:
So I think there’s two things to recognize at the outset. First, whether we’re seeing a plateau or a revival, either of those is better news than what had been the kind of popular and accurate news, which was people were getting less and less religious. So whether they’re just plateauing and they’re not getting worse, they’re just kind of staying the same level, or whether they’re actually starting to get more religious again, either of those is better news than what we would’ve been getting as news, say, four or five, six years ago. The other thing to notice though is that in asking if we’re seeing a revival, it can be very tricky to assess that quantitatively. And I’ll explain why. Because if you notice when Ryan’s talking, he’s comparing the data from the 1970s to now. So here’s why that’s tricky. I’m recording this in the middle of the day on Wednesday.
And so if you said, “Is the weather getting warmer?” Literally it is. It was cooler this morning, it’s the middle of the day now, it’s getting warmer and warmer. On the other hand, it is cooler today than it was yesterday, quite a bit cooler today than it was yesterday. So if you said, “Well, is the weather up or down?” Both. It just depends what is your point that you’re comparing it to. So if you say, “Do Americans seem to be more religious now than they were two years ago?” There’s some signs that the answer to that is yes, very clear signs that we’re seeing in big sets of data. But if you say, “Is the number of Americans that are religious greater than it was in 1995 or 1955?” Clearly not. So those two stories can both be true, that people do seem to be getting more religious than they were a couple years ago, but it hasn’t completely reversed all of the losses we’ve been seeing for decades.
So we want to be fair, we want to be honest about both halves of that story.
So Ryan has told the story of a plateau, and this story of a plateau was one of the things that actually first drew my attention to the fact that there might be a reversal, that is to say a revival. He noticed this back in 2024, that the number of Americans who labeled themselves as having no religious affiliation, the so- called nuns, had hit a ceiling that had been going up and up and up pretty consistently. And then a couple years ago, it just stopped going up. Well, now Ryan has come out just a couple days ago with new information based on the most recent set of data from what’s called the Cooperative Election Study, which is a massive data set, I’ll get into this in a minute, that is found pretty clearly for now the third year in a row that the number of people with no religious affiliation hasn’t just plateaued, it’s actually clearly going down.
And he’s forthright about this. So he shows on this graph that when you compare the number of people who describe themselves as having no religious affiliation, the numbers went from 36.2% of Americans said that they were either atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular in 2022. That number then shrank a little bit to 35.6% and then shrank faster to 34.1%, and then shrink faster to 31.8%. And at this point, it doesn’t appear to be some kind of fluke in the data. As Ryan points out, this is statistically significant shifts. And the CES, eCooperative Election Study, is a pretty massive study. It’s quite a bit larger than the General Social Survey, which is another big social survey that happens. During election years, they have 60,000 or more respondents, which is just massive. They usually are focused on political science stuff, so that’s why they do more during election years.
But even in off years, they’re above 15,000 respondents. So this is a very large data set. So when it’s showing this level of drop year over year, that’s worth paying attention to. And if you look at the broader trend, remember, this is kind of that point I was making earlier about the weather. How far back do you look? If you’re looking from 1972 to 2024, you can see the number of people with no religious affiliation in the US skyrockets from 5.5%. It goes up slowly for a while, 6.7% in the early 90s, and then it just shoots up in a pretty much unbroken line throughout the 90s and the 2000s and the 2010s, and it caps at about 28%, and now we’re seeing it drop again. Now, it’s still much higher than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, but it’s also clearly going down.
Those things are both true. Now, having no religious affiliation, as Ryan points out, there’s three groups. You have atheists, you have agnostics, and you have nuns, just people who they’re not atheists, they’re not agnostics, they just don’t have a particular affiliation. And we’re seeing all of those groups apparently on the decline. Atheists were consistently between six to 7% of the sample from 2015 to 2024. That’s a long time. Now, the atheist numbers had kind of peaked. In 2015, they didn’t go markedly up. They just sort of had flatlined. Agnostics are in the same time period, again, about a decade, we’re consistently five to 6%. Now we’re seeing it go down. Now it’s about 5% and 5%. So together, do the math here, about 10% of Americans are atheist and agnostic put together, but they’d been 13% of the sample and 12% of the sample in the last two years.
This is a pretty steep decline. I mean, that is a large drop. Some of that, again, you can say, well, maybe the numbers are not exact fine, but this is a huge dataset that we’re dealing with showing what seems to be a very clear drop. So that’s atheists and agnostics, but again, a lot of the nuns aren’t atheists or agnostics, they’re just nothing in particular. They had actually risen during that decade. So while atheism and agnosticism has flatlined, just a general vague irreligiosity had gone up from 20 to 24%, but it’s also dropping back. And so now it’s down to 21% in 2024 and 21% in 2025 as well. So it’s actually lower now than it was in 2019. So in all three groups of irreligious people, we’re seeing the numbers are actually going down. So that is good news for religion in general. That’s also good news for Christianity in particular because we’re seeing some slight gains, and admittedly, slight gains among the number of Christians and self-proclaimed Christians, just within the last couple of years.
So for instance, Ryan points out that the Protestant share of the population was 32% in 2022 and it’s risen slightly to 33%. The Catholic share has gone up 2% between 2022 and 2025. And so if you’re wondering where are those nuns going, some of them are going to non-Christian religions, but a lot of them are going to Protestantism and Catholicism, and a slight bit more seem to be going to Catholicism. This actually is part of a very fascinating, broader trend. Now, there are a lot of negative trends of every generation being somewhat religious than the one before it, but looking particularly the comparison of Catholics and Protestants in the US, something fascinating is happening. So right now, amongst baby boomers, those born between the years … 1946 and 1964, they’re twice as likely to be Protestant as they are to be Catholic. 21% of baby boomers are Catholic and twice at 42% are Protestant.
Among millennials, 16% of us are Catholic and 27% are Protestants. So again, more than half as many more. So if you’ve got five people, roughly three Protestants and two Catholics, if it’s all a Christian group, among Gen Z, we’re seeing something very fascinating. First, the number of Catholics appears to, if anything, be going up. It’s 19% of the generation compared to 16% in the millennial generation, and the number of Protestants is almost equal to that. The gap is now 22 to 19. And in fact, in the 2023 data, which does seem to have been, in fairness, kind of fluke data, there were actually more Catholics who responded in that data set. And Ryan Burget’s done some good stuff, calling attention to the fact that there was some weird stuff in the 2023 data we don’t really know why. Sometimes polls, you just get a weird crop of people.
But it does seem like that as you’re seeing this growth, particularly amongst the young, there is a bit of a skew towards Catholicism. Now, there’s a lot that goes into that. That’s not all conversion, that can be immigration, that could be people leaving Protestantism, but you’ve gone from a situation where it was two to one Protestant to almost one-to-one Protestant Catholic. And again, that’s just looking at the Christian population, but we’re seeing a conversion to religion, we’re seeing a conversion to Christianity, and we’re seeing a conversion to Catholicism in the data. Now, is that enough to say there’s a nationwide revival? No, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think there’s some exciting signs that we could be heading in the right direction, but what I do think we can say with a good deal of confidence is that we have some small fires blazing.
Now, I’m borrowing and somewhat misappropriating a line from James three here, where James, in describing Sins of the Tongue, says, how great a forest is set ablazed by a small fire. Now, the point he’s drawing, small actions can have really big effects, is something that we should be mindful of, not only in terms of bad actions like sins of the tongue, but also in good actions like little revivals. And I was really pleased to see in the Atlantic article, Luis Perales making this same point that if we overemphasize the national trend lines, we might actually miss real changes on the ground in local communities. And as he points out it, twofold or threefold increase in converts can change the composition of a campus or a parish. It can increase his commitment to service. Its interest in contemplation and conversation is desire to foster a culture that isn’t bogged down by careerism.
And then he gives some really good points from history that frequently when we see major historical kind of seismic shifts, it doesn’t start out at the national level or at the level of culture, but rather a committed counterculture. And he gives several examples like the temperance movement, the abolitionist movement, civil rights movement, but he also gives the example of the Dominicans, that the Dominicans started out as this small movement that then changed the face of Europe and now might be changing the face of Greenwich village. So I think this is something to bear in mind that on some level, whether there’s a national revival or not, it’s an important question, but it’s not the only important question. Is there a revival in your heart, in your parish, in your community? And if there is, amazing things can happen there. And so I want to kind of end with some helpful advice about not quenching the Spirit and also trying to cultivate this flame.
So first, how do we not quench the Spirit? Now you might recognize that as a line from one Thessalonians 5:19. We’ll get into the broader context St. Paul gives for that, because I think it’s something we have to be very mindful of. But I’m a big believer that when things are going well, you should at that point be considering how to prepare for hard times. Don’t just assume the good times are going to keep being good forever. So you gather acorns during the summer or in the terms of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, during times of contemplation, you remember desolation. When things are going well for you spiritually, you build up the sort of resources to survive when things might be going more poorly. And it’s going to be really good to think about what are all the ways this can go off the rails. And there’s a lot of things we can do wrong with it.
There are a lot of ways we can thwart this and we can put out the kind of fires of revival that the Holy Spirit appears to be starting. We can quench the spirit in a lot of ways if we’re not careful. And one of the ways, and I don’t mean to make a point about any political party in particular, is to watch out that we don’t tie this just into a political movement because a lot of the studies and speculation and commentary around this is wanting to say how much of this is partisan. And the good news is we’re actually seeing a drop in the nuns, a drop in the religiously unaffiliated among conservatives, liberals, and independents. It doesn’t appear to just be a political movement. We will get ourselves in trouble if we tie Catholic revival into one party or one ideology or one social project, no matter how good that may be.
And you can see that pretty clearly just by looking at the data. So the last 20 midterm elections, going all the way back to 1946, in 18 of them, there were two exceptions for what are pretty clear reasons in 1998 because of annoyance with the Republican Congress, and in 2002, because of post nine eleven support for George W. Bush, in two cases, the President’s Party gained seats. In the other 18 cases, they lost seats, oftentimes quite dramatically. Now, I mentioned this for a clear reason. If you hitch the bandwagon of Jesus Christ and his church to a political party, you’re going to be subject to the vagaries of politics. And there is this inherent political cycle. Regularly, a party in its ascendancy will say, “Aha, the future is us. We’re the future. We’re going to be the winners forever.” And then two years later, four years later, reality hits them in the face, and then the other party says the same thing, and reality hits them in the face a couple years later.
And so it goes. And so if you tie Catholicism or Christianity more broadly to any ideological movement, to any political party, we will pay for it in the long run. That doesn’t mean you can’t be political and religious, but I would suggest we think of it like we would think about any number of other things. If you are in a bowling club and you’re really into your faith and you can bond with your friends over bullying and religion, wonderful. But if you insist for someone to be a true Christian or a true Catholic, they have to be part of your bowling league, now you’ve gone too far. So by all means, be political, but within bounds, and those bounds should be really simple. Number one, on issues that are prudential, don’t demand everyone agree with you. And number two, on issues that aren’t prudential, make sure you’re listening to the church over your preferred political party.
If you follow those things, go be political. But keep it in those bounds where people still feel welcomed even if they have different ideas about say tax policy than you do. That’s my kind of word of warning about not quenching. And similarly, we don’t want to quench by being jerks, et cetera. We’re going to return to that at the very end. But positively, how do we stoke the fires? It’s not enough to just not quench them. Obviously, don’t put the fires out, but how do we help fan them into flames? And I wanted to look at a couple of concrete, admittedly, purely anecdotal cases here that I think have something to say for us. Number one, from the New York Times piece, one of the people Elizabeth Diaz looks at is Amanra Pryor, who is a PhD student, Howard. He started his freshman year of college during the pandemic.
He struggled with depression, finding community. He had grown up non-religious and agnostic. And then through friends, was introduced to non-denominational Christianity. That then got him asking deeper questions about what it means to live a good life, to do good, what is faith? Is faith reasonable? That then takes him down some rabbit holes. He starts reading ancient philosophy from Christian thinkers. He starts watching YouTube videos from Catholic Apologists like Tomistic Institute and Taylor Marshall. When he moves to Washington, he starts attending mass at Santa Augustine’s. A congregation started by emancipated Black Catholics before the Civil War, and there he is going to be received into the church at Easter Vigil. So I give his story to just say, “Okay, what can we draw from that? ” Number one, there’s a place for apologetics. I’m an apologist. I have to plug that. But number two, that’s not at all the only place.
This culture of invitation was really good in getting him to some kind of community first and non-denominational Christianity, and then getting him to ask the deeper questions. Apologetics can then fill that hole, but that hole doesn’t get prompted to be filled by you just approaching strangers and saying like, “Hey, why are you not watching shameless popriy?” Although by all means, you can do that. I won’t be upset. But it’s probably more effective if you actually just form friendships with people. And this is something that is a recurring theme. And what we’re hearing from pastors, what we’re hearing from bishops, that one of the things people are responding to is a sense of loneliness. And as they’re finding community, when that community is centered around Jesus Christ, that’s what’s getting people to start asking questions like, “Is this true?” So it’s not either or the theology and apologetics or the community.
It’s both and they have this really important relationship of people being invited into something that then gets them to ask deeper questions than they might have asked on their own. And Archbishop Rozanski, the Archbishop of St. Louis, which has also seen tremendous growth lately, makes this same point. He said there’ve been two significant societal shifts in recent years that have upended the human sense of community. One of those is technology, another is COVID. And this has made people more isolated, more alone. I think he’s right on the money there. And he said, “We’re realizing that many of the ills of our society, things like anxiety and depression, come about from that isolation. We know rates of anxiety and depression are way up.” And he said, and I think he’s right here, that the loneliest cohort of people are those between 18 and 30 to 35.
And several diocese have seen a lot of growth among this demographic. So you have people who’ve been isolated, who’ve been alone, and one of the things we have to offer is community. And I mentioned this because I’m not saying to water down evangelization, water down apologetics, any of that. Hopefully, if you’ve ever watched this channel before, I don’t believe in doing that, but I do believe that as Catholics, we often overcomplicate it. We imagine that if I’m going to be an effective evangelist, I have to have an answer for every question people have. You don’t. Frequently, you just have to invite them. You just have to show up. You just have to befriend them. You have to accompany them and God will do the rest. Even if you can’t answer all the hard questions. And look, if you’re someone who regularly watches this show, I’ll go out on a limb and say, “You’re probably better than average.” And answering those hard questions, if they do come up, just don’t let your intellectual limitations or your anxiety or your ego get in the way of just taking the risk of inviting people in.
The New York Times article also said that this is what we’re seeing in the data. Only 8% of the roughly 53 million Catholic adults in the US are converted. So we’re not doing as well as we could be in terms of conversions. And the main reason people convert is because of marriage, but there are other reasons as well, like spiritual fulfillment, friends and family. That’s what people say in terms of why they’re converting. And so that gives us good tools because even if you can’t answer every question, you can probably give someone a good spiritual book, you can be friendly, you can make people feel welcomed. And that goes a long way towards meeting the needs, the human and spiritual needs that people have identified for themselves. Now here, as I was preparing this episode, I encountered some more good news. I had always heard that after OCIA, after then RCIA, and after the Easter vigil, that there’s a huge drop off where the first year, a lot of people have gone through all of this work to become Catholic then just disappear.
And it turns out that the Center for the Applied Research and the Apostolate at Georgetown University did some work on this about 10 years ago and found out that that just wasn’t true, that actually the retention rates are quite high amongst converts to the faith, that they’re more likely to go to mass and that even years on, overwhelmingly, they’re still Catholic. What does happen, and this New York Times article sort of points to that, is that people do move. So if you’re someone who is going through Parish A’s OCIA program and you’re in the process of getting married and you get married in that parish, you and your spouse may go set up life somewhere else and you might be in a different parish. So from Parish A’s perspective, you’ve just disappeared. And so maybe they just think like, oh no, they got married. They went through all that process of coming into the church and then they just stopped going to mass.
But maybe you’re a regular Masco or deeply involved in Parish B where you and your new spouse have just moved in together. And so the good news that I’m finding is the retention rates are actually much better than I thought they were. And so there’s a kind of popular narrative about a post Easter vigil drop off that isn’t totally true. Nevertheless, this is a great time as Easter vigils upon us for you to seriously think about inviting someone who is either curious about Catholicism or in a special way is newly brought into the church and help them to get more connected, have coffee with them, invite them to things, let them feel that deep sense of community. Catholic parishes are often quite large and we don’t often have the organizational structure that you sometimes see among like Protestant mega churches. And so there isn’t a built-in system to help us do this.
We have to just step up to the plate and do it. And so that’s what I want to give you by way of counsel, but I want to let St. Paul give even better counsel. This is a passage I promised to get back to. He says, see that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always. Pray constantly. Give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the spirit. Do not despise prophesy, but test everything. Hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil. That is good advice for every one of us. That’s good counsel. Those are good commands from an apostle, but those are also the steps we need to take for healthy cultures, healthy communities, and to really fan the flames of revival.
If we have a culture where we are rejoicing, where we’re not tearing each other down, but have an attitude of gratitude, I know it rhymed, I apologize, of real thankfulness that we are praying constantly, that we’re really living this out. We’re not just arguing about theology on the internet, but are actually committed to a life of prayer. If you follow these steps, if you hold on to what is good while abstaining from every form of evil, we’ll see some tremendous growth. Now, I want to leave you with two things. Number one, I want to really encourage those of you who may be coming into the church to share your story in the comments below, because it really makes a difference. It’s really encouraging to hear from all of you who are coming into the church. I know it’s gratifying to me. I know it’s gratifying to a lot of people, and I know that I and the other people will be praying for you.
And two, if you’re interested, I thought it might be helpful to look at another dimension of the church because just as we have all of these young, vibrant people coming into the church by way of conversion, we also have a lot of young, vibrant people becoming priests. And so if you’re interested in nerding out over for the data and what it means for the future of the church, you might appreciate this video I did on what the young priests look like in the US. For shamous popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.