The Easter season brought what many hailed as good news for Catholicism: data showing a surge in conversions, a story that captured secular media attention around the world, from the United States to Europe, South Korea, Asia, and New Zealand. But what to make of the phenomenon? After all, it’s indisputable that the number of adults now joining the Church can’t make up for the decades-long collapse in membership just about everywhere. What it really might suggest is something else: the end of the “sociology” of mass Catholicism and the new appeal of the Catholic “form” in a disconnected, de-ritualized world. Conversions seem to express the desire for physical, in-person gathering places, a trend among young adults in large urban centers post-Covid. Some on the right interpret these “conversions” as a traditionalist response against secularization. But it is often forgotten that such an option is possible only in countries where there is freedom of religion—freedom not only de jure but also de facto. In fact, such freedom is one of the fruits of the secular age, something underacknowledged by those who view the rise of adult baptisms as a political move against modernity and liberalism.
Yet the growing number of adult baptisms in various European countries and the United States has gotten the notice of Church leaders who are attentive to even the smallest signs of revival. In his brief visit to the principality of Monaco in March, Pope Leo said in an address to the youth: “Even today the faith faces challenges and obstacles, yet nothing can dim its beauty and truth. We can see this in the growing number of men and women of all ages who desire to know the Lord and ask to be baptized.” Though there’s a cautious wait-and-see approach among people in the Church, the rising number of adult baptisms is no longer a passing phenomenon. It has crossed the North Atlantic from the United States and become part of the new social dynamic of global Catholicism—evident in major Western European cities via the presence of immigrant Catholics communities with roots in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There is also the “civilizational” reaction to the perceived loss of national identity that was historically tied to Catholicism and is now seen as threatened by multiculturalism.
The search for certainty and identity does not always have a political dimension, though when it does, it can take many forms. To be sure, the Catholic political right and theological conservatives and traditionalists seem particularly interested in this aspect. In France, it has been observed that Catholicism is transitioning from the status of a once-reliable conservative majority to something more akin to a “trendy minority.” Dismissing these new conversions as theologically and politically reactionary risks overlooking the possible rift developing, in the United States and elsewhere, between the conservative or traditionalist Christian right and the neo-pagan techno-right, as exemplified by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Religion-switching is much more common in the United States than in Europe. It’s notable that the first pope from the United States is also more familiar with the phenomenon of adult conversions than his predecessors, Francis included. Leo XIV’s pragmatic course on liturgical traditionalism reflects the need to understand and adjust to this trend, including in how the Church continues to implement Vatican II. In a March 25 message to the French bishops, Leo said that it is time to seek “concrete solutions” that will generously include those sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo.
Church leaders see how the phenomenon of “conversion” to Catholicism in a world of options can be subject to political and ideological manipulation. As the Marseille cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline said about young catechumens, there is a “desire for identity” that “gnaws the heart of young people” and that is “perfectly legitimate.” But there is sometimes an extremist quest of identity that is “a dangerous caricature.” The Catholic Church must “view it positively, understand it and nurture it, so that it is not used as an alibi for dangerous identity-based tensions.” The Church and the Vatican might have learned something from some of the prominent “political” (and short-lived) conversions to Catholicism in the early 2000s, like those of Magdi Cristiano Allam and others. That knowledge could be useful in understanding how the current wave of conversions might affect the dynamic between secularization and the Church ad intra: Will the Church continue to grow weaker sociologically as the hierarchy seems willing to do almost anything to recruit more young people—especially candidates to the priesthood?
Those who are called “converts,” especially those in media and politics, are the vanguard of a laity that differs from the politically self-assured, theologically grown-up Enlightenment Catholics of the second half of the twentieth century. The new generation is more assertive (see the issue of the pre–Vatican II “Latin Mass”). In the early post–Vatican II period, a sociologically influential institution could afford to alienate such vanguards—like those in favor of women’s ordination and married priests, and those who sought more autonomy from the Church hierarchy in political matters—and had the energy to impose limits on their agendas. This should also be thought of in the context of the two opposing narratives concerning the twenty-first-century recovery of Christianity from the forces of twentieth-century secularization: the future of the Church as composed of “creative minorities” (Benedict XVI and Benedict Option) versus “cultural Christianity” (the political theology notion that posits the return of religion as the product of Christian, or at least pro-Church or pro-Christianity political leaders bringing their countries back to God and God to their countries).
These narratives affect the United States more than Europe. The old continent’s politics and cultures have always been distinct—even on the right—from the subset of MAGA “religious” figures railing against “godlessness.” In Europe, the ideological quest for a Christian identity is more an ecclesial than a political question: the influx of new members joining as adults will have consequences for the future of the Church more than the future of the continent. But it is a new face for European Catholicism, and another step in the long march out of Christendom—which not even the return on a large scale of the pre–Vatican II “Latin Mass” would be able to bring back.
From the ecclesial (how the Church works in reality), ecclesiastical (the level of the institutional Church), and ecclesiological (the theology of the Church) points of view, the phenomenon of rising adult baptisms is also a new phase in the history of the post–Vatican II period. The council was a “saddle time” in the social history of the Catholic laity. The most successful new movements and groups started before Vatican II, and in the early post–Vatican II period, the institutional Church tried to rein them in with a policy of “institutionalizing”; internal autonomy was granted in exchange for obedience and no visible dissent, all under the control of the founders and, at variable distance, of the Vatican. The pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI expressed confidence in the ability of those new groups to renew the Church and to discipline themselves. Then, in recent decades, the growth of those movements plateaued. Many were implicated in the sexual-abuse crisis. And the transition from the original founders to the second generation of leaders has been complicated. Founding personalities remained allergic to institutional control, while the challenges of managing increasingly complex organizations emerged and internal conflicts erupted in public—for example, in Communion and Liberation in Italy; in a number of new ecclesial communities in France during the pontificate of Francis; and with the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae in Peru, approved by John Paul II in 1997 and abolished by the Vatican in early 2025. There’s also the evolving state of Opus Dei, given the reforms started by Francis in 2022 and the potential repercussions of Pope Leo’s meeting in March with Gareth Gore, the author of a book on the group’s alleged misdeeds.
The rising number of adult baptisms is a largely spontaneous movement, and, unlike the period between the 1970s and early 2000s, they occur without the social dynamics and institutional culture that supported the rise of earlier “new” ecclesial movements. High-profile social-media personalities have an influencing role, but there is no unified movement of adult converts. There is also a weaker theological system—sola structura, as an op-ed in the German newspaper FAZ put it recently—that barely interacts with this new population.
Also unclear is how, or even if, this wave of adult baptisms is a response to synodality. Almost four years ago, at the beginning of the synodal process, Piero Coda, a European theologian and the intellectual leader of Focolare, wrote that the challenge for the new movements was twofold:
To prevent paths that are conceived and undertaken without radical listening to the Spirit and docility to his impulses from crashing against the opposing rocks of a social commitment that ends up failing to implement the Gospel of the Kingdom, and to prevent a fundamentalism that fails to recognize the autonomy of earthly realities and the dialogue with the cultures, knowledge, and arts that express and promote them.
Blanket explanations of the conversion phenomenon can easily be tinged by ideological claims. I’ve seen in my own family the various dimensions at play. The dean of Italian Catholic theologians, Severino Dianich, wrote recently:
It is no surprise that the Churches find themselves unprepared for the new situation. For a thousand years, since the Christianization of the Baltic populations, Christians in Europe have not evangelized. When they have, they have done so by sending missionaries to so-called “non-Christian” countries, almost as if the world were still divided into Christian and mission territories.
From the ecclesial and theological points of view, the phenomenon of adult baptisms may have more urgent impact on European than American Catholicism. But it has far-reaching questions for the whole Church—on the baptism of infants and the baptism of adults; on evangelization and catechesis; on the future of ordained ministry and lay leadership. It may yet reshape the manner in which our ecclesial communities are formed.
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