Is the Catholic Church ready for a new wave of converts?
A remarkable thing has been happening in the Catholic Church in the United States over the past few years: growth.
The absolute number of Catholics remains level, largely because more Catholics are dying than are being baptized. Among adults though, it looks like more people are converting to Catholicism than leaving it. And many dioceses are reporting a significant uptick in people joining the Catholic Church just since 2024. The Archdiocese of Newark reports a 72 percent increase in adult conversions over the past three years. Similar spikes have been reported in Cleveland, Portland, Ore., Cincinnati and many other dioceses.
Dioceses widely report that the wave of new converts is disproportionately youthful, full of millennials and zoomers—who, polls suggest, show some signs of gravitating back toward religious belief. Let me be clear: It is too early to celebrate, and sociologists are still debating the numbers, which are so new that the Official Catholic Directory hasn’t fully compiled the most relevant data. Still, it is always a sign of hope for the church when people seek out the faith. Many young Americans still want to be Catholic.
This pattern of conversion-based growth, especially among the young, is fairly unprecedented in the history of American Catholicism. (For simplicity, in this article I will use conversion in a colloquial sense, meaning all those entering into the Catholic Church, including those converting from a non-Christian religion, those seeking full communion as a baptized Christian, and Catholics who had missed at least one required sacrament of initiation.) Although the pontificate of St. John Paul II is widely remembered as a time of youthful revival for Catholicism, the impact was seen mainly on the level of devotion, not in numbers. Historically, the American church has fought hard just to retain membership, building its own institutions and social networks to keep immigrants and their descendants from assimilating into the larger Protestant culture. When membership has increased, immigration and natural growth through children born into Catholic families have always been the major driving factors.
There have been American converts, of course, and sometimes these have made noteworthy contributions (indeed, in some areas, like fiction writing, politics and apologetics, converts have been among the most prominent Catholics), but their absolute numbers have generally been tiny compared with the number who leave. For years, Catholics in ministry have had conversations about “evangelical Catholicism,” “intentional Catholicism” and the “church in mission”; and those efforts have borne some good fruit, reformulating the conversion process to help people to think more deeply about the spiritual growth involved in conversion and about the particular gifts they can offer to the church. Until now though, those efforts have never had the kind of impact that would draw the attention of a demographer. Instead, cradle Catholics have for decades been drifting away in demoralizing numbers. That longstanding trend accelerated across the 2010s, creating widespread consternation as it began to appear that the American church was destined to shrink.
After a brutal quarter-century of marked decline, things began to change in 2023. The Order of Christian Initiation of Adults classes started to fill. This year, in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, 54 percent more adults and children are expected to receive sacraments of initiation than last year. Around the country, parishes and university campus ministry programs have been reporting large numbers of catechumens. Mass attendance began to rise after Covid, and then it rose further, recovering from the post-pandemic slump.
It is wise to be circumspect about this turnaround, considering its newness, and also the hazards of embracing trends that may have complex connections to our nation’s polarized politics. Indeed, the political scientist Ryan Burge, who writes frequently about religious trends, already has offered some words of caution. A professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, Burge told Religion News Service that he believes the current stability in American religiosity is the “calm before the storm” and that generational shifts will continue to cause drops in numbers over time: “Gravity still goes down,” he said.
Those cautions should not be permitted to smother this moment of hope, however. If it can be sustained, conversion-based growth could open a whole new chapter for the American church. It will mean changes, some of which will inevitably be awkward or uncomfortable for longtime Massgoers. There will be new challenges, demanding patience, courage and creative problem-solving. In the end, though, this could be a very exciting time to be an American Catholic. And if God is calling us to be a light to our compatriots, we need to do our utmost to answer that call.
Some Sociological Answers
Conversion-based growth is such a new phenomenon that explanations are necessarily speculative. We know that people are knocking at our door. We are still working to explain the reasons why. As a helpful starting point though, it is worth examining a related subject on which we do have considerable data: the decline of American churches across the past several decades.
The truth is that the Catholic Church in the 21st century has been hemorrhaging members at alarming rates, with more than half of cradle Catholics leaving the faith at some point (though some may return) and infant baptisms falling by more than 40 percent. Behind those numbers we might glimpse darkened churches, shuttered schools and bereft parents praying fearfully for the souls of their children and grandchildren. It may or may not be comforting to hear that other Christian churches have been wrestling with similar problems.
Two recent works in the sociology of religion can give us a basic picture. The sociologists Jim Davis and Michael Graham (with research and commentary from Ryan Burge) focus more heavily on evangelical Protestantism in their 2023 book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? But they discuss Catholicism as well, and it is interesting to compare their conclusions with those of the Catholic sociologist Christian Smith, whose 2025 Why Religion Went Obsolete is almost unremittingly bleak in its prognosis for institutional religion.
Davis and Graham walk readers through the numbers with bracing clarity, but they still have hope for institutional churches, warmly encouraging their co-religionists to redouble their efforts to reach out to the “dechurched,” who need a “Christian family” for fellowship and support. Smith, by contrast, appears to have given up on any real prospect for revival. He disparagingly compares churches to electric typewriters, record players and rotary phones, implying that churchgoing, like these archaic devices, is becoming an eclectic affectation of those who refuse to submit to the “cultural zeitgeist.” He thinks it likely that Americans will retain some form of faith or spirituality, but he argues that they will increasingly refuse to be straitjacketed by the creedal, traditional, institutionalized faiths of their fathers. Modern people expect their faith, like their shoes, playlists and coffee orders, to be adapted to their personal preferences. They are not, in his opinion, interested in accommodating themselves to a pre-set mold.
These books present sharp contrasts, but there is a deep sense in which these authors seem to be offering “half full” and “half empty” assessments of the same glass. Graham, Davis and Smith all recognize that American Christians have not in general rejected churchgoing so much as they have drifted away from it. Some do have deep objections or bruising experiences that explain their departure. In general, though, “dechurched” Christians are quite likely to have orthodox theological views and positive feelings about “Christian culture.” A large share still read the Bible and pray to Jesus. Even Christian moral teachings may not be quite as alienating as has sometimes been supposed. Asked whether they might return to church, many say they could or even intend to, if they were to find a pastor, parish or social set who make churchgoing more appealing.
In short, many people have given up on church for the same kinds of reasons they have shed other institutional connections, family ties and traditions. It was not a “good fit.” It is not “who they are” anymore. Life went a different way.
Davis and Graham treat this as a hopeful thing. Dechurched Christians, they argue, are still in the Christian orbit. A non-attending person who still loves Jesus, identifies as a Christian and even looks favorably on institutional churches might certainly be persuaded to return. They encourage Christians to redouble their efforts to reactivate those who have fallen away: Reach out! Have a parish picnic! Invite your dechurched friends to dinner or a movie night! Stronger social programs, or just ordinary friendliness, can sometimes make a big difference.
Davis and Graham are Protestants, but Catholics are having similar conversations, trying to figure out how to support and accompany people through the vicissitudes of life. These are important questions, and we need to keep exploring their dimensions. We certainly should want our Catholic communities to supply that network of connective tissue that keeps people close to one another and to Jesus. We want people to feel welcome at church and to value the human relationships they forge there.
Nevertheless, it is important not to miss the challenge captured in Smith’s much bleaker perspective. Where Graham and Davis see millions of people who are at least open to churchgoing, Smith notes how easily they have shrugged it off. Modern people’s relationships with authority and tradition, he speculates, may simply have changed. People do not agonize about leaving the faith their ancestors have kept for generations; it is just another lifestyle choice for them. Insofar as this is true, it could represent a challenge for institutional religion that cannot be resolved through mere friendliness.
Catholicism has a vast and fertile tradition, with resources to answer all sorts of questions and meet an enormous range of spiritual needs. Still, it is not a choose-your-own adventure. There are commitments. There are rules. The catechumen should present himself at the church door hoping to be changed by grace, not looking to capture a particular kind of experience or, worse, to add Catholicism to his carefully tailored platform and profile, like a well-chosen accessory. If Smith is correct to see a personalized, build-your-own faith as the main thing people want nowadays, it seems true that the church must necessarily decline.
But what if it is not? Maybe the uptick in conversions speaks to a recognition, at least in some people, that limitless personalization and preference satisfaction are not the key to real happiness. Truth is worth more than 1,000 ideological echo chambers. Grace is more powerful than a pile of self-help books. A million social media followers mean nothing in comparison with a community where one is seen and loved as a unique and precious person, created in God’s own image. After a lifetime of being managed by algorithms and massaged by influencers, some people feel a deep yearning for something real. If we can help them to glimpse it within the Catholic Church, its future in the United States could be very bright indeed.
In Search of Truth and Beauty
Truth has become a precious commodity in modern times, not in spite of but because of the flood of information that most of us have at our fingertips 24 hours a day. It turns out that giving people access to vast stores of unfiltered “content” does not necessarily help them to live grounded, purposeful lives. Although Catholicism has always attracted a fair number of intellectual converts, most people probably do not come for the philosophy or the doorstop-sized catechism. However, ordinary people do want answers to life’s most defining questions. Why does my life matter? Is there a way to find value in suffering? How can I be a better person? How can my faith provide deeper relationships, greater community, stronger social ties?
The church has answers to those questions. Sometimes Catholic teachings may seem clunky or out of date, especially when the world is fixated on a new question (or perhaps an old one asked in a new way) that the church is still weighing and considering. We live in an age of hot takes and 12-hour news cycles, and Catholicism does not move at that speed, which at times may seem like a punishing disadvantage. Every age has its “heretics,” ready and eager to jettison anything necessary to build a new worldview around the latest discovery or intellectual fad. A hot take is worth nothing, however, if it is not true.
Over time those fads tend to flame out, while the church remains, helping people to order and find meaning in their lives, guiding them back toward God. The Catholic Church’s answers to the big questions have, in their fundamentals, been the same across thousands of years. That can be a powerful selling point for people looking for truths that stay.
In addition, grace often seems to be in short supply in an age when nearly everything else seems abundant. I posit that this is the yearning that drives people to the church, when they come to recognize the inadequacy of “bread alone.” People’s bodies today are adequately nourished, but their souls are not.
Quite often, beauty is the stimulant that makes people aware of their spiritual hunger, and it can also be a beacon, leading them to the place where nourishment can be found. Beauty tends to give people intimations of the transcendent, and it can instill an appetite for more. This is a good reason to cultivate as much beauty as we can in our churches, liturgy and music, and we should also be forthright about the abundant sources of grace that are available within the church. Sacraments are a particularly precious source of grace, reserved for the baptized, but prayers and sacramentals can be beneficial to anyone and may for many be an entry point to a fuller Catholic life.
Too often, Catholics feel sheepish about their rosaries, scapulars or other sacramental objects, worrying that these will be perceived by outsiders as superstitious, antiquated or hokey. We should remember that sometimes these earthier or more physical elements of Catholicism are appealing to people grasping for grace. We have plenty of intellectual entry points to the faith, but also points of contact with the transcendent that people can touch, hear and smell. Many Protestant faiths place great emphasis on particular feelings or experiences as important milestones for salvation. In Catholicism, we can see God in a monstrance, or taste God on our tongues. That can be an immense relief and a wonderful conduit to grace, particularly in a world where influencers of all stripes are continually trying to make us feel a particular way.
Called to Love
Love is the most defining aspect of the Christian life, and also the hardest. We know that we are called to love everyone who comes to the faith, regardless of their physical or moral condition. We also know that the point of conversion is to be reborn and transformed by grace. How can we love new or potential converts better, responding to their emotional or spiritual needs but also encouraging them to grow?
It is a daunting challenge, to say the least. Without trying to offer easy answers, it may be helpful to reflect that as the body of Christ, our communities have a transcendent purpose that the world cannot fill. Of course, we should still do ordinary human things. Casseroles, fish fries, basketball games, summer camps, baby showers, book clubs, and outreach to the elderly, sick or bereaved should all play a part in our communities.
Graham and Davis’s research indicates that many of the unchurched want a lot more of these things, and we should do them, because service and fellowship help us to grow in love. But we should also bear in mind that the church will never win the fight for souls simply by having the best casseroles and summer camps. There are gyms that are better equipped for basketball tournaments, restaurants that have more experience with fish. Even when it comes to helping the poor or sick, the church’s material resources are small next to those of the state. The state, however, cannot affirm a person’s value as a unique and precious child of God.
If people no longer want to be loved in that way—as sinners with a transcendent destiny—then the church’s mission is truly doomed. But I suspect that they do.
There are plenty of reasons to worry about how the church might change under the influence of a new wave of converts. They will have their own baggage and their own ideas about how to do things. There will be turf wars, liturgy wars and cradle Catholics who no longer feel at home in their own parishes. Some people will convert, leave and then complain about what they found in the church. Others will convert, stay and complain about what they find in the church.
But converts also bring unique gifts: Often they bring greater biblical literacy, a fresh zeal for the faith, an adult appreciation of the difficulties and graces of the church that cradle Catholics might not always consider or appreciate, and a greater diversity of background and opinion.
All together we can produce a bright and vibrant future of our faith in this country. From its colonial period, the United States has nurtured a Catholic subculture that has often flourished but always remained a definite minority. Until quite recently, even that minority seemed to be dwindling. Perhaps the time has come for the seed to bear good fruit again.
If so, that flowering will manifest the very real and precious treasures that have always defined the Catholic faith: a clear and consistent source of answers to life’s defining questions, an ever-flowing source of beauty and grace, and a rich human anthropology that can help us to love one another better. Those goods have no sell-by date, and there are many indications that Americans today badly want them.
As an adult convert myself, I rejoice to see other new converts in the faith. And I pray that there will be many, many more in the years to come.
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