A remarkable thing has been happening in the Catholic Church in the United States over the past few years: growth.
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A remarkable thing has been happening in the Catholic Church in the United States over the past few years: growth.
The absolute number of Catholics remains level, largely because more Catholics are dying than are being baptized. Among adults though, it looks like more people are converting to Catholicism than leaving it. And many dioceses are reporting a significant uptick in people joining the Catholic Church just since 2024. The Archdiocese of Newark reports a 72 percent increase in adult conversions over the past three years. Similar spikes have been reported in Cleveland, Portland, Ore., Cincinnati and many other dioceses.
Dioceses widely report that the wave of new converts is disproportionately youthful, full of millennials and zoomers—who, polls suggest, show some signs of gravitating back toward religious belief. Let me be clear: It is too early to celebrate, and sociologists are still debating the numbers, which are so new that the Official Catholic Directory hasn’t fully compiled the most relevant data. Still, it is always a sign of hope for the church when people seek out the faith. Many young Americans still want to be Catholic.
This pattern of conversion-based growth, especially among the young, is fairly unprecedented in the history of American Catholicism. (For simplicity, in this article I will use conversion in a colloquial sense, meaning all those entering into the Catholic Church, including those converting from a non-Christian religion, those seeking full communion as a baptized Christian, and Catholics who had missed at least one required sacrament of initiation.) Although the pontificate of St. John Paul II is widely remembered as a time of youthful revival for Catholicism, the impact was seen mainly on the level of devotion, not in numbers. Historically, the American church has fought hard just to retain membership, building its own institutions and social networks to keep immigrants and their descendants from assimilating into the larger Protestant culture. When membership has increased, immigration and natural growth through children born into Catholic families have always been the major driving factors.
There have been American converts, of course, and sometimes these have made noteworthy contributions (indeed, in some areas, like fiction writing, politics and apologetics, converts have been among the most prominent Catholics), but their absolute numbers have generally been tiny compared with the number who leave. For years, Catholics in ministry have had conversations about “evangelical Catholicism,” “intentional Catholicism” and the “church in mission”; and those efforts have borne some good fruit, reformulating the conversion process to help people to think more deeply about the spiritual growth involved in conversion and about the particular gifts they can offer to the church. Until now though, those efforts have never had the kind of impact that would draw the attention of a demographer. Instead, cradle Catholics have for decades been drifting away in demoralizing numbers. That longstanding trend accelerated across the 2010s, creating widespread consternation as it began to appear that the American church was destined to shrink.
After a brutal quarter-century of marked decline, things began to change in 2023. The Order of Christian Initiation of Adults classes started to fill. This year, in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, 54 percent more adults and children are expected to receive sacraments of initiation than last year. Around the country, parishes and university campus ministry programs have been reporting large numbers of catechumens. Mass attendance began to rise after Covid, and then it rose further, recovering from the post-pandemic slump.
It is wise to be circumspect about this turnaround, considering its newness, and also the hazards of embracing trends that may have complex connections to our nation’s polarized politics. Indeed, the political scientist Ryan Burge, who writes frequently about religious trends, already has offered some words of caution. A professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, Burge told Religion News Service that he believes the current stability in American religiosity is the “calm before the storm” and that generational shifts will continue to cause drops in numbers over time: “Gravity still goes down,” he said.
Those cautions should not be permitted to smother this moment of hope, however. If it can be sustained, conversion-based growth could open a whole new chapter for the American church. It will mean changes, some of which will inevitably be awkward or uncomfortable for longtime Massgoers. There will be new challenges, demanding patience, courage and creative problem-solving. In the end, though, this could be a very exciting time to be an American Catholic. And if God is calling us to be a light to our compatriots, we need to do our utmost to answer that call.
Some Sociological Answers
Conversion-based growth is such a new phenomenon that explanations are necessarily speculative. We know that people are knocking at our door. We are still working to explain the reasons why. As a helpful starting point though, it is worth examining a related subject on which we do have considerable data: the decline of American churches across the past several decades.
The truth is that the Catholic Church in the 21st century has been hemorrhaging members at alarming rates, with more than half of cradle Catholics leaving the faith at some point (though some may return) and infant baptisms falling by more than 40 percent. Behind those numbers we might glimpse darkened churches, shuttered schools and bereft parents praying fearfully for the souls of their children and grandchildren. It may or may not be comforting to hear that other Christian churches have been wrestling with similar problems.
More than 450 catechumens preparing to enter the Catholic Church at Easter take part in the Rite of Election at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston March 9, 2025. It’s a “very exciting day in the church in Boston, and throughout the world, really, where so many people are entering the church,” said Bishop Mark W. O’Connell, then a Boston auxiliary and vicar general. Credit: OSV News photo/Gregory L. Tracy, The Pilot
Two recent works in the sociology of religion can give us a basic picture. The sociologists Jim Davis and Michael Graham (with research and commentary from Ryan Burge) focus more heavily on evangelical Protestantism in their 2023 book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? But they discuss Catholicism as well, and it is interesting to compare their conclusions with those of the Catholic sociologist Christian Smith, whose 2025 Why Religion Went Obsolete is almost unremittingly bleak in its prognosis for institutional religion.
Davis and Graham walk readers through the numbers with bracing clarity, but they still have hope for institutional churches, warmly encouraging their co-religionists to redouble their efforts to reach out to the “dechurched,” who need a “Christian family” for fellowship and support. Smith, by contrast, appears to have given up on any real prospect for revival. He disparagingly compares churches to electric typewriters, record players and rotary phones, implying that churchgoing, like these archaic devices, is becoming an eclectic affectation of those who refuse to submit to the “cultural zeitgeist.” He thinks it likely that Americans will retain some form of faith or spirituality, but he argues that they will increasingly refuse to be straitjacketed by the creedal, traditional, institutionalized faiths of their fathers. Modern people expect their faith, like their shoes, playlists and coffee orders, to be adapted to their personal preferences. They are not, in his opinion, interested in accommodating themselves to a pre-set mold.
These books present sharp contrasts, but there is a deep sense in which these authors seem to be offering “half full” and “half empty” assessments of the same glass. Graham, Davis and Smith all recognize that American Christians have not in general rejected churchgoing so much as they have drifted away from it. Some do have deep objections or bruising experiences that explain their departure. In general, though, “dechurched” Christians are quite likely to have orthodox theological views and positive feelings about “Christian culture.” A large share still read the Bible and pray to Jesus. Even Christian moral teachings may not be quite as alienating as has sometimes been supposed. Asked whether they might return to church, many say they could or even intend to, if they were to find a pastor, parish or social set who make churchgoing more appealing.
In short, many people have given up on church for the same kinds of reasons they have shed other institutional connections, family ties and traditions. It was not a “good fit.” It is not “who they are” anymore. Life went a different way.
Davis and Graham treat this as a hopeful thi
