Young Men and the Return to Rome
Over the Easter weekend, the Catholic Church in the U.S. saw a surge in adult conversions. According to an analysis from the Catholic prayer app Hallow, the Church in the U.S. saw a 38 percent increase in conversions from 2025 to 2026, predominantly driven by men in their 20s. Some dioceses saw conversion rates significantly higher than the rest of the nation, with the Diocese of Duluth in Minnesota (+145 percent) and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles (+139 percent) leading the way. The Diocese of Rapid City in South Dakota (+96 percent), the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee in Florida (+85 percent), and the Archdiocese of Chicago (+52 percent) also saw significant spikes.
There is one home that will never turn young men away: the Church.
The National Catholic Register found a similar trend: the Diocese of Norwich in Connecticut (+112 percent), the Diocese of Pueblo in Colorado (+105 percent), the Diocese of Venice in Florida (+94 percent), the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown in Pennsylvania (+84 percent), and many others saw drastic increases in the rate of adult conversions. “Last year, we had no idea where all the people came from then; 2025 eclipsed every year we had had up to then. We thought it might be an anomaly,” Father Armand Mantia, director of the Archdiocese of Newark’s OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults), told the National Catholic Register. Newark saw a 30 percent increase in adult conversions, accounting for over 1,700 converts welcomed into the Catholic Church. “And then, all of a sudden,” the priest continued, “we had our rituals for 2026, and 2026 blew away 2025, which we didn’t think was possible.”
The question is: What’s driving the influx into the American Catholic Church? There are a number of factors, of course, many of which are the same factors which have always driven conversions to the Church, but some of which are unique to the present age.
First of all, Catholics have attained a number of high-profile positions in the U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Border Czar Tom Homan, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other key figures in President Donald Trump’s second administration all identify as Catholic, as do many of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “conservative” justices: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Crucially, Pope Leo XIV is the first American-born Pontiff, a fact which generated much renewed interest in the Church when he ascended to the Chair of St. Peter.
The increase in high-profile Catholics in the U.S. — particularly those associated with conservative politics — has no doubt played a role in inspiring conversions, especially among those who identify as politically conservative. One factor which cannot be overlooked is the attraction of young men to the Church. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, suggested, “Young men who felt rejected during COVID and the ’great awokening’ of our culture in the last decade have turned to the right.… One of the few institutions welcoming them with open arms is the Catholic Church.”
This desire for some bastion of tradition and culture to cling to is closely related to the broader desire for spiritual meaning and depth; the Catholic Church offers it all. For 2,000 years, the Church has carried on its traditions and doctrines, celebrating the Mass, building cathedrals, and rigorously defending Truth Himself. Particularly in the present age, wracked as it is by hedonism, nihilism, materialism, secularism, progressivism, and a host of other cancerous “isms,” the stability and immutable teachings of the Church appear as a last defense, an impregnable wall that no enemy can mount. When all other institutions have abandoned or altered their creeds, ceded morally and politically to the pressures of the modern world, compromised even in the innermost corners of their souls, the Church will still stand.
Young men have been left spiritually homeless in the 21st century. Feminism has derided them as “toxic” and established as secular dogma that women can do anything that men can do. Corporate interests, with politicians in their pockets, have decimated the job and housing markets, so that the dream of providing for a family is, for many young men, just that: a dream. Progressive forces have identified young men as problematic and, when they can’t be convinced to mutilate their bodies and identify as women, have tried to sideline them, heaping rewards upon various minority groups and leaving young men to fend for themselves in an increasingly brutal world.
There is one home that will never turn young men away: the Church. Despite the babble of some of the aging ideologues within the ranks of the Church’s hierarchy, the Church Herself is a safe haven for the young men left homeless by this world, hated, derided, and preyed upon by the forces of hedonism, nihilism, materialism, secularism, progressivism, and all the other diseased little “isms.” The Church is not just a passing fad, either, it is not a traveling circus, pitching its tent here one day and disappearing the next. She will be a bastion for truth until the end of the world. As Pope St. Paul VI once said, “The Church is not old, she is ancient; time does not weaken her, and if she remains faithful to the inner and outer principles of her mysterious life, it rejuvenates her.… Like a firmly rooted tree, she brings forth from herself, in every age of history, a new springtime.”
READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:
The Bishops’ Misplaced Priorities
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