Oh, they are "Americans" now?
Why Are So Many Young Adults Becoming Catholic?
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.
More at: https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/why-are-so-many-young-adults-becoming-catholic/