Published May 6, 2025
Record numbers of young adults came into the Catholic Church on Easter weekend. The statistics are regionally mixed, but they confound the cynics. In France, over 17,000 catechumens were baptized during the Easter Vigil, marking a 45 percent increase in adult baptisms compared to the previous year and the highest number since records began in 2002. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles welcomed the highest number in a decade. Other U.S. dioceses report 24 percent increases in young adult baptisms compared to 2024. The United Kingdom saw a similar surge.
Then, on Easter Monday, they learned that Pope Francis—the 265th successor to Peter, but the first pope that they understood to be theirs—had died. A reflection on what the Church needs in its next papacy should consider this remarkable return of many young people to the faith.
What is striking is not only the number of young people entering the Church, but that they have done so after being formed—indeed, malformed—by a culture that relentlessly promised them a liberatory, god-like autonomy, warned them of the “oppression” and “bigotry” of the moral law, and raised them with a dogmatic rebellion to tradition.
Previous generations could at least compare such revolutionary promises against some living memories of a different moral and spiritual order. In contrast, many of these young adults have known little else, and what they did know was easily enveloped and disintegrated by technology. The dogmas of the cultural revolution for them could often be indistinguishable from reality itself.
Despite this saturation, many came to realize their reality was not real. This generation came to the Church not in ignorance of her demands, but in full awareness of them—and in defiance of the “wisdom” of the age. It could be argued that this is just another sort of rebellion. Perhaps for them, watching their grandmothers chant in response to abortion restrictions, “We will not go back!” made coming into the Church look positively cool. That is certainly possible.
It is also the case that the truth is quite simply compelling. We are made for it; it does not just appeal to our intellect but awakens our deepest longings. Amid a landscape that frames bodily disfigurement as liberation, the truth of the Church might seem like a wide-open door from inside a prison cell. Why would they not walk through it?
There is also good reason to think a number of these conversions are not just an escape but an encounter, and one that often begins with real rigor. “They are reading their way into the Catholic Church,” a priest friend told me, someone deeply engaged in young adult conversions for decades. “They are seriously studying the writings of the earliest Church Fathers and discovering both to their dismay and eventually to their delight that what was from the beginning, from the day of Pentecost on, with all its both glorious and sordid history, is the Catholic Church of today. And they are seeking entry. They want the true body and blood of Christ. They want the security and the universality of the one, holy, Catholic, apostolic Church.” Praise God.
Even as many young adults are finding their way into the Church, many others are being swept further into the fragmentation of the age. In my current work, I examine the growing phenomenon of young adults severing ties with their parents, going “no contact” not over abuse or betrayal, but over ideology.
A common refrain among those who have severed ties with their parents is this: “I didn’t choose to be born.” Because their parents made the decision to bring them into the world, they argue, any obligation in the relationship rests entirely on the parents—not on the child, and not even on the adult child. The implication is that their own life is not a blessing but a burden. The response to their life then is not gratitude but grievance. This represents a direct rejection of the Fourth Commandment: “Honor your father and your mother.” Notably, it is the only commandment that comes with a promise, “that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” Implicit is a corollary societal and spiritual warning.
There will always be repackaged ways of telling people that their lives have no meaning, that they are a burden, that people are disposable, replaceable. The family, the teachings of Mother Church, the spiritual fatherhood of the papacy and the priesthood, our invitation to divine filiation, all form a grand, romantic, cohesive, sublime vision directing us to unity—first with Christ and then with one another. It is a vision that does not need to be repackaged; it carries inexhaustible truths that can whisper or roar into the interior of the soul. It is the very best news.
Social dynamics of conversion and collapse are always present to varying degrees, but this Easter, in many ways, felt like an inflection point. The Church can respond to both groups of young adults with the fullness of Church teaching, not delivered sheepishly but like a true shepherd. The converts need encouragement and formation to deepen and direct what has begun. The people outside of the fold who are vulnerable to predation and despair need to see that what the Church stands for is profoundly for them and unapologetically against what is consuming them. The witness of Jesus Christ, reflected in the person of a Holy Father, can meet every soul at every stage.
We ought not squander the moment. What we do not need are self-conscious, curated messages that fragment the faithful into demographic niches, infantilizing some and alienating others. The same Good Shepherd who calls each sheep by name also wields the rod against the wolves and searches tirelessly for the lost with clear knowledge of the mortal dangers that await them until they are found.
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Noelle Mering is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center where she co-directs EPPC’s Theology of Home Project. She is the author of the book Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (TAN Books, May 2021).
