A few days ago, writing about Pope Francis, and the challenging state of the Roman Catholic church in the wake of his recent death, I pointed out that the Catholic parishes thriving in the West were filling with younger orthodox Catholics trying to escape the trendy Lefty stuff in all other areas of their lives. But that was more observation than hard data and I doubted that it was compensating for the loss of congregants as the older, more religious generations died off.
Now there is some hard data, starting with the USA:
A Harvard University survey revealed a significant increase in the percentage of Generation Z identifying as Catholic, with numbers climbing 15 to 21 percent from 2022 to 2023.
That seems to be part of a general trend across Christian faiths, as reported from several sources.
- Newsweek
Barna’s latest data showed that 66 percent of all U.S. adults surveyed have “made a personal commitment to Jesus.” That marks a 12 percent increase since commitment levels were polled in 2021. Pew Research Center also released a report in February showing that the declining rates of Christians that had been tracked for years have begun to taper off and stabilize. - New York Post
A survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. And while historically men and women converted in equal numbers, vastly more men have joined the church since 2020. - Independent
[T]he most remarkable jump in reported attendance has been among [UK] Generation Z, quadrupling from 4 per cent to 16 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds. There’s been an even more dramatic shift for young men: a fivefold growth from 4 to 21 per cent.
Big increases in UK bible sales as well, by £2.33m from 2019 to 2024 compared to a £277,000 increase from 2008 to 2019. - This Easter, the Catholic Church in France baptised 10,384 adults, along with about 7,400 new members aged 11 to 17. This is the highest number of entrants in more than 20 years, and a 45% increase in adult catechumens compared to last year. Father Benoist de Sinety, a parish priest in Lille, noted that this year’s Ash Wednesday masses “shattered attendance records,” with many congregants being “young people attending for the first time.”
The Harvard survey did not inquire as to what’s driving the Catholic conversions but follow-up interviews with young university Catholic converts did:
Gen Z was raised in a society of decaying moral structure and the near elimination of religious values from the public square, most notably in media, and witnessed first-hand the disastrous results of such a pattern.
…
Members of Gen Z are being exposed to toxic cultures and recognizing how unfulfilling and draining they are.
…
As Gen Z students have grown up through recession, a pandemic, and social and cultural turmoil, having religion and gender roles has become a sense of comfort and purpose for us.
But why Catholicism specifically?
When modern society is actively trying to destroy its vital cells – marriage, the nuclear family, authentic community – people are running to the institutions that have held the same foundational truths since the beginning.
…
[Other churches] seemed inauthentic in their embracing of modernism and alignment with contemporary social trends…. Catholicism, meanwhile, retains the traditions and practices of the early church.
Given that many Catholic parishes have embraced the same stuff over the last few decades, especially in Pope Francis’s time, I wonder why conversions to the Orthodox church are not showing up as much, since it is very much rooted in the “traditions and practices of the early church”? The New York Post article did make one reference that’s significant:
Father Josiah Trenham has led Saint Andrew’s Orthodox Church in Riverside, California…. According to Trenham, there has been a “feminization” of modern church services, including “emotional songs, swaying, uplifted hands, and eyes closed in ecstasy…Men are much less comfortable [in those settings], and they have voted with their feet, which is why they’re minorities in these forms of worship,” he said. “Our worship forms are very traditional and very masculine.”
Which connects to this, showing up across the West with Gen-Z:
As Jon Gabriel puts it in his article, The Tin Gods Have Failed Us:
After a lifetime of being blamed for everything wrong with the modern world, [Gen-Z men are] more likely to worship in premodern forms. Many have headed to old-school Catholicism, attending masses in Latin, participating in frequent confession and seeing women donning mantillas. Similar reports come from Orthodox parishes.
Over on the Left the likes of “Bomber” Bradbury have lamented that they’ve driven out young men, but unless they dump toxic #MeToo feminism, Gender theory, and Identity Politics in general I can’t see how they’re going to reverse that.
Mind you, the Right Wing capitalists had better watch out also:
The quick route to financial success collapsed in the 2008 housing bubble and hasn’t recovered since.
Among Millennials and Gen-Z, the un-affordability of buying a house is almost always their number one issue, and that again is across almost all Western nations. But there’s plenty of other ugliness as well
Those who once placed their faith in politics have been served a rogue’s gallery of mediocrities or worse; meanwhile, adherence to progressive ideologies literally makes people crazy. Romantic attachments have plummeted with the rise of online hook-up culture, and a lifetime of seeking academic knowledge has been interrupted by screeching protestors chaining themselves to university doors… The chaos only intensified in the 2020s. The pandemic lock-ups; violent protests focused on race and the environment (and now Teslas); assassination attempts; wars and rumors of wars. Nothing feels stable and no one’s in control.
This has happened before in human history; religion falls away when times are good – but when suffering returns people start to look to religion for answers. Our modern age felt it had solved this permanently with secular institutions, but they – and the people who run them – are the very things that have caused the suffering.
No Minister 
The conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher has been talking about this phenomenon for several years now.
https://roddreher.substack.com/
Dreher was a Protestant convert to Catholicism who then converted to Orthodoxy in the 2010s after years of investigating the Catholic sex scandals.
I think the reason that the Orthodox aren’t picking up new converts at the same rate as the Catholics is basically down to infrastructure. They have less parishes, churches and clergy in the West. It’s wrong to say that their churches are ethnically exclusive but they are based in the old ethnic diaspora zones, mainly Greek and Russian. Orthodoxy is also not a strongly proselytizing denomination, you can walk into their churches, but they won’t send out teams of missionaries to find you and bring you in.
It’s also interesting to see how the Liberal Protestant denominations have been so accommodating, so open minded and eventually so compromising that now they basically have no doctrines left at all. No heaven, no hell, no The Word of God and certainly no temptation of the Devil towards sin.
All they have left now is what Rod Dreher calls “Moral Therapeutic Deism”. The Church is only there to make you feel better about yourself. I’m OK, you’re OK we’re all OK.
Women, gay and lesbian ministers have played no small part in all of this. Once an organization, any organization, reaches a certain level of homosexual membership, especially homosexual leadership, it basically becomes a homosexual organization dedicated to homosexual goals. A straight man has no interest in being a member of a homosexual organization, why would he? I suspect that’s largely the case for women as well.
People will give their resources, time and money to support the Church, for the priest to say prayers and preach the word of God, for monks and nuns to meditate and study scriptures. They will not give time and money to support a homosexual social club and priests’ and monks’ hot little boyfriends.
It’s all very interesting stuff, and with a new Pope on the way soon we may be at a real cultural turning point.
That’s because we don’t believe you’re going to hell. Or at least not yet, anyway. We’re very optimistic about the salvation of anyone other than ourselves, so we’re not going to hunt you down, unless you *want* to be hunted down.
In my humble opinion, no-one understand what God is.
God is totally different from anything we mortal creatures, that think we are so sapient, can understand.
My idea of God is something that is eternally and infinitely intelligent, wise and omnipotent.
We frail, dumb, mortals just make stuff up to satisfy our silly little egos and have no idea “what it’s all about”.
My idea of God (that I don’t understand either) is an entity that created he entire universe and everything in it to function in Harmony.
That entity also “connected” everything in the universe so that all the parts could communicate to maintain harmony.
Our silly species and each of it’s members are parts of God’s universe that are also connected to every other part. We are so “smart” that we refuse to understand this simple thing.
Some people have what I call a soul. I don’t know what that is either but it enables us to care for, love and help one another “as ourselves” so that the “organism” (our species) can function harmoniously.
We are all tempted to “sell our souls” for fame and fortune and treat other people as a means of achieving our own selfish desires.
Some people might not have even had a soul to begin with.
We have no idea what a soul is. We do not even know what our “mind” is.
The people without souls have taken over. They are the lunatics that are running the asylum and the people with souls are the inmates because they allowed it to happen to them and our entire species.
My idea of what God might be created our species and gave us this amazing planet (Garden of Eden) with everything we could ever want or need for free.
That God gave us the total freedom and ability to decide for ourselves what we wanted to do with all that was given and our individual lives as well.
We were all given a soul (or not) and all the other things we need to be able to decide to become real human beings or selfish, cruel, greedy savages.
We were even told, by so many wise people of the past, how simple becoming a real human being could be.
It’s in 14 words that no-one seems to remember and modern people never even heard about.
Do these 7 things. Try to become more.
Humble, Charitable, Chaste, Temperate, Diligent, Patient and, most of all GRATEFUL for all that we have been blessed with.
Learn to resist the temptations to be.
Proud, Greedy, Lustful, Gluttonous, Slothful, Wrathful and worst of all Envious for what we want for our greedy selves.
God does not care what we think, say or do because our species is just a tiny speck in the Universe God created.
We have chosen to follow and obey the people that had no souls or sold them and become a source of disharmony and chaos in God’s Universe.
The proper name for our species is not Homo Sapiens Sapiens as we call ourselves.
The proper name is Homo Dumb and Dumber. We are going to cause our own extinction because we are so UNGRATEFUL for all the wonderful blessings that God gave us.
I don’t care a bit because I have been totally blessed with all I could ever have dreamed of needing or wanting.
I am just “Paul Revere” riding my “horse” through the night to try to warn the people that might listen of what I see coming even though I know few of them will listen because they are so much ,ore important and smart than I am.
My old body will be gone soon but maybe my soul will still exist. I don’t really care because life has been so good to me- so far.
Have a good day Homo Dumbass because there will not be many days left for you and our species.
Tom I think the Catholic Church has a certain appeal because simply people quite like ceremony and the Catholic Church still has the biggest sense of mysticism to it.
They also have the coolest churches (or at least the majority of them). They’re beautiful and immensely peaceful places.
And in uncertain times (like these, especially post Covid) people look to find comfort and meaning and faith provides that for a lot of them. Thinking that events are part of a “plan” is a lot more soothing then thinking it’s all just random madness.
I do have a question as to whether the objection to women priests is because you think it’s against the teachings of Christ or whether simply because you don’t think the church should have to adapt just because someone says it has to to be “fair”. Personally if an organization says their rules say that only men can hold a certain position, and the members of that organization all agree then all power to them.
But I don’t subscribe to the view that women in the Church is against some fundamental teaching of Christ (which by my reckoning kind of boils down to “be excellent to one another”). I certainly tune out once people start selectively quoting things from the Old Testament – because we all know that if we followed that to the letter we’d be killing/maiming people for all sorts of offences.
I’ve also read a number of comments here about Presbyterians. Well I was raised as one of those and my experience doesn’t match what people here seem to think. In the same manner as my Catholic friends weren’t indulging in what we know happened in that historically with some of the nuns and priests, so I don’t make broad statements about Catholicism.
As an aside I’ve always loathed militant atheists because to me they’re just as “religious” in their beliefs as the most fundamental, militant believer in God.
The answer is marketing. People don’t know the Orthodox Church exists, but they know about Catholicism, and that’s the most authentic version that presents itself to them.
In the United States, there’s probably at least fifty million Catholics. There’s maybe three million Orthodox if you count the Arabs and Greeks who only show up at Pascha. I would say that the Orthodox Church is getting similar percentages, but less volume.
All I know is what I see before my very eyes every Sunday. Half our choir wasn’t even chrismated a year ago. Every time the Priest says the prayers for the catechumens during the liturgy, I’ve never failed to see less than a dozen people come forward, and that’s been static, even with regular baptisms and chrismations occuring. That wasn’t happening at this level before Covid. There is a cultural phenomenon occurring. And what is really interesting is the diversity of races. Lots of black people converting too. Does it skew male? Definitely, but with five daughters, I can’t complain.