It’s been all over the news: United States Catholics see a 38 percent surge in adult converts over Easter 2026. Do a Google search and you’ll get more.
EWTN, in an article entitled, “The Rise of Religious Young Men,” reported that “Pundits point to various social trends. In the recent presidential election, young men rejected Kamala Harris’ fuzzy, feminine message — opting for Trump’s manly message. Many young men find Jordan Peterson’s solid, intellectual, commonsense worldview an attractive antidote to the wild world of woke ideologies. Within the specifically religious communities, local men’s groups, conferences, retreats and books on modern masculinity have flourished… and their influence now seems to be bearing fruit.”
From (the liberal) Religion News Service: “A wave of new Catholics is coming this Easter.”
National Review reported that at Harvard this year, 50 students planned to join the Church through the school’s Catholic center, a double-digit increase from Easter 2025.
“In 2025, Bible sales were up 11 percent over 2024, with approximately 18 million Bibles purchased across the U.S. Further, after the assassination of conservative political influencer Charlie Kirk, 2.4 million Bibles were sold in September 2025 alone,” NR concluded
I’ve seen the proof of this convert phenomenon in real time. This past Holy Saturday I attended an evening Holy Saturday Mass at St. John the Evangelist Church in Center City as the godfather of a newly baptized Catholic, a 28-year old who grew up in a Catholic family but for some reason was never baptized. Over time, my friend’s search for meaning in life led him to Catholicism but first he made a pit stop of sorts to my Orthodox Christian parish where he attended Divine Liturgy. Struck by the beauty of the liturgy, he approached a priest after the service and told him he was interested in becoming Orthodox. What he was really asking, of course, was, “How do I become Orthodox?” The priest told him to keep coming to services, and left it at that.
Needing a more structural approach, he went to a local Catholic church near his neighborhood and asked the same question of a priest after Mass. That priest immediately brought him into his office and signed him up for a course called the Order of Christian Instruction of Adults (OICA), a multi-month course on Catholic apologetics and doctrine. The die was cast.
As someone who was baptized and grew up Catholic but who later went over to Orthodoxy – I did so mainly for liturgical reasons; the Catholic Mass after Vatican II had too many jarring Protestant elements – I felt bad that Orthodoxy didn’t have a better program to corral and train possible converts, whereas the Catholic Church, being the mammoth universal Church that it is, had convert-instruction tweaked down to a science.
Possible converts were not left alone to simply figure things out on their own.
My friend’s OICA class was filled with men and women in their 20s and 30s. The goal was to train everybody over a period of seven or eight months and then have the class ready for the Holy Saturday service that I attended. During that service, there was a large number of people to be baptized, while those who had already been baptized were there to be confirmed. In my friend’s case, he would be baptized, confirmed, and receive his first Holy Communion.
What surprised me about the St. John’s gathering were the apparent equal numbers of men and women converts, since news reports, most notably the New York Times, had the numbers of male converts to Catholicism (and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy) way above the number of women converts. What I found interesting in the OICA converts at St. John’s were the few females I spotted with nose rings. A nose ring on a woman stereotypically represents feminism in the highest degree, a pro-choice advocate who might have a few choice words to say about the “patriarchy.” Certainly not someone who would kneel before a statue or an icon of the Virgin Mary.
Were these repentant feminists, I wondered?
Catholicism, certainly, is no left-wing religion, although it may be seen in that light when it comes to issues of war and peace and immigration, but in all other categories it falls squarely in the camp of unshakable, traditional values: No sex before marriage, no birth control, no divorce, no acting out of homosexual desires and no gender madness.
My friend, the new convert, identifies as a traditional Catholic. (He later told me over dinner he believes the Society of Saint Pius X, or the SSPX, is the truest form of Catholicism.) When he received communion that Holy Saturday evening, he knelt on the floor and received on the tongue. He was the only one in the church to do so. He prefers ancient liturgies; the modernist stuff makes him cringe.
After the two-hour ceremony and Mass we both agreed that, despite some glitches, the service was beautiful. We agreed the hymns and the accompanying piano were disappointing because they had a Southern Baptist flavor. Whatever happened to Gregorian chant?
As an Orthodox Christian, I wasn’t used to seeing so many lay people making busy around the altar: girls in strapless dresses lighting candles, and lay people distributing communion. This is something you’d never see in Orthodoxy, although young women in Orthodoxy as well as Catholicism love making fashion splashes in church by wearing mini-mini-skirts.
And yet, as I said, it was a beautiful service, especially the baptisms, witnessing as I did one person after another coming up to the baptismal font, especially those girls in nose rings.
