Catholic churches PACKED for Easter as conversions skyrocket
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Father Burke Masters, whose St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Parish in the Chicago suburb of Hinsdale reported a 124% year-over-year increase in new members, told WLS-TV that the average age of those being received into the church is 28 years old.
St. Mary’s Church near Texas A&M’s campus in College Station, Texas, also managed to roughly double its 2025 Easter baptism numbers, welcoming 61 catechumens into the Catholic Church. Again, most of the newcomers were apparently young adults.
“Most of the [new members] are students, most of them are invited by other students, most of them also maybe heard a call or were drawn to the church,” Rev. Will Straten told KBTX-TV. “So it’s great to see more students desiring to be baptized and to live the faith.”
Boston Archbishop Richard Henning, who saw the churches under his purview similarly packed over the weekend and expected over 680 catechumens to join the Church at Easter, told CBS News, “I think this generation just seems open to the call of the Lord in a way that we’ve not seen in a while.”
Numerous other American dioceses — such as the Archdiocese of Newark — similarly reportedly years-high numbers of new Catholics converts, as did dioceses elsewhere in the Western world.
In Canada, for example, the Archdiocese of Toronto counted a total of 2,050 adult catechumens baptized at its Easter Vigil celebrations — a 12.4% increase over last year. Other Canadian dioceses, including those covering the cities of Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver, were also reportedly set for significant growth over the weekend.
In France, over 13,000 adults were set to be baptized into the Catholic Church over the weekend, including more than 700 catechumens in Paris, reported the National Catholic Register.
The numbers appear especially high in large part because conversion numbers in recent decades had fallen so low.
According to U.S. diocesan statistics compiled by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University and analyzed by the Pillar, there was a precipitous decline in the number of people becoming Catholic from 2000 to 2020.
Whereas, for instance, there were 173,674 adults baptized or received into full communion in 2000, that number reportedly had plummeted to 70,796 in 2020.
The Pillar noted that while there has been a significant increase in the number of new adult Catholics following the pandemic, the number of babies baptized every year has dropped by over 50% since 2000.
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