April 2026 – A few months ago, my daughter, who is one of those notorious Instagram “influencers,” sent me a video circulating on social media by a young Catholic known as “the Irish Yank.” He was recording himself walking to Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village—along with several hundred other young people who seemed more excited than fans rushing to a Taylor Swift concert. Probably because the Person they were going to see wasn’t an ordinary celebrity. It was Jesus.
This was one of many signs I’ve seen about the changing times. The news across the media is that young people and old people and converts and reverts are coming into Church, and dioceses throughout the country, including here in Bridgeport, witnessed “a significant jump” in people being received into the faith at the Easter Vigil.
A recent New York Times headline proclaimed, “Roman Catholic Churches see a surge of new converts: Bishops trying to understand what’s behind the wave.”
For once, the Times didn’t have all the answers, and apparently the bishops didn’t either. “Of course, we think it’s the Holy Spirit,” Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, said. “But we are kind of stymied.”
A headline in the Springfield Daily Citizen said, “Searching for what was missing in life, they found the Catholic Church.” Another Times headline asked, “Is Christianity making a comeback?” And then, “Adult conversions to Catholicism surge across U.S., data shows.”
As a result, there’s been a lot of head scratching and the kind of a secular reductionism you often see in the media. One reporter wrote: “Respondents pointed to a range of possible reasons, including the desire for community, social and political instability, outreach to young people and technological change.”
I’m inclined to think the answer is much simpler, and it doesn’t have as much to do with social media, technology, artificial intelligence or popular trends. It all comes back to the always dependable, often inscrutable Holy Spirit.
Of course, journalists don’t understand that it’s tough to pin down the Holy Spirit with the five “Ws.” The Spirit confounds the researchers, the pundits and the so-called experts.
I recently saw the power of conversion firsthand when I attended a two-day conference sponsored by the St. Jerome Center, which featured three biblical scholars—two former Protestant ministers, Scott Hahn and John Bergsma, and one secular Jew, Jeffrey Morrow—who are converts to Catholicism and shared their zeal for the Word of God with more than 800 Catholics, from teenagers to seniors. I sat with six young Catholics, and their fervor for the faith was contagious.
People are coming into the Church and back to the Church because of the tremendous outpouring of grace in our age, I believe.
It was something I first witnessed a few years ago, when I interviewed young women entering the religious life. It was a phenomenon the secular media was struggling to figure out. One columnist attributed it to women being disenchanted with professional careers and the lack of “good men,” along with a few other inane reasons. On the other hand, I guess the husband rationale makes sense, when you compare the available inventory of prospective husbands to the perfect husband they found in Jesus.
At the time, I interviewed Jaime Mitchell, a 1995 graduate of St. Joseph High School—now Sister Jaime Mitchell of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago, who told me: “I was very far away from my faith and not practicing it. I went the opposite way, the way of the culture, and found myself hanging out with people who liked to go drinking and partying.”
She had a boyfriend, a good job and many friends but found herself asking: “Is this what life is all about?” Then, she went on a retreat and had “an encounter with the Risen Lord in the Blessed Sacrament … I came back from that retreat and broke up with my boyfriend and I started attending daily Mass, reading the Bible, praying the Rosary and trying to live a holy and virtuous life.” She also started going to Eucharistic Adoration. That’ll do it every time.
As the secular world ponders the reasons for people coming to the Church, I think of a story about Walker Percy, one of the most celebrated novelists of the 20th century, who converted to Catholicism. It baffled many of his friends, the same way the conversions of St. John Henry Newman and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton did.
Once, a bewildered reporter asked Percy why he would ever become a Catholic, and without missing a beat, the writer replied, “What else is there?”
What else is there? Nothing.
