Allison Girone / @LatinMassPhotographer
A recent report from the Free Press explored a growing trend: Young adults across the US and Europe are turning to the Catholic Church in striking numbers.
The boom in adult baptisms this year included notable increases in US dioceses such as Lansing, Michigan, which saw a 30% rise in new converts, Madeleine Kearns of the Free Press reported. Similar surges were reported in France and England. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, one Catholic center baptized 20 students and received another 50 converts from other Christian denominations.
Kearns spoke with several converts and Catholic leaders who described a cultural moment in which Catholicism is resonating in unexpected places.
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Among those interviewed was Jane, a 22-year-old baptized in New York this Easter. Though raised without religion, she told Kearns she had long appreciated the “aesthetic elements” of Catholicism. As a child, she was drawn to scenes like the baptism sequence in “The Godfather” and later admired the architecture and stained glass of older churches.
Jane said that a stunning work of art, or a beautiful piece of music, “shows how present God is in our lives to inspire us.”
Her path to the faith began not in catechism, but in music — Gregorian chant, Mozart’s Requiem, and cathedral architecture stirred her sense of the sacred.
Later, during a period of anxiety over graduate school applications, she felt an unexplained urge to watch a livestream of Mass from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“I just immediately felt, like, this sense of peace,” she said.
Bishop Robert Barron and other Catholic leaders have long emphasized beauty as an entry point for evangelization — an approach increasingly resonant among Gen Z.
“It’s easy to forget, in an age of efficiency and technology, that human beings need beauty and awe,” Kearns wrote.
Kearns also interviewed Darnell, 21, who found Catholicism through a campus missionary. He was moved by the reverence and silence of the Mass, and later by the intensity of Eucharistic adoration.
“I’ll never forget when one of the priests was walking up and down the aisles…and just the people that were crying and bowing, and the atmosphere was amazing,” he recalled. “That’s when I knew: Okay, this is exactly what I was searching for.”
A convert from Michigan, he said Catholicism “doesn’t shame you for being a man” and emphasized its appeal to young men seeking meaning.
“It’s that brotherhood among other brothers of Christ, along with that discipline that I believe is bringing so many young men to Catholicism,” he told Kearns.
The rise of male converts was noted by Fr. Charles Gallagher, pastor of Immaculate Conception in D.C., Kearns reported. Of the seven adults he baptized this year, six were men.
Fr. Gallagher observed that some young men initially gravitate toward online personalities who frame masculinity as under attack in modern culture. While those messages may resonate at first, Fr. Gallagher told Kearns that many soon recognize that figures in the so-called “manosphere” are “kind of false prophets.”
That realization, he said, often marks the beginning of a deeper search.
“They’re led to Christianity,” he said. “They’re led to Catholicism.”
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