What was it about 2025? After Easter that year, some of us wondered whether it would be remembered as the year the poisonous “awokening” began to lose its grip, and something older and quieter began to stir in its place. In 2026 the question has only grown louder.
France, once the “eldest daughter of the Catholic Church” and lately the hardened exemplar of laïcité, is leading the way. This past Easter, the Wall Street Journal reported, 13,234 adults were baptised in its churches, three times the 2019 figure. Teenage baptisms rose to 8,152, ten times the 2019 number. When Pope Leo XIV visited in September, reportedly around 800,000 people attended Mass in the Place de la Concorde, with young people prominent in the crowds, many of them apparently finding faith amid loneliness, war and uncertainty.
Across the Atlantic, The Free Press asked that question. C.S. Lewis did it: a staunch atheist, he reasoned his way back to belief as a young Oxford don and later called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
Now two Gen Z philosophy PhD students at Princeton have travelled a similar road. Joe Schmid, 26, spent years arguing against the case for God on his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, until he began to study miracles. “God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” he told Suzy Weiss. His friend Noah McCay, 27, has converted too, and others in the department are reportedly considering it.
Weiss asks whether these young men studied their way into belief or whether the intervention was more divine than that. Catholic theology speaks of the “motives of credibility”: the reasons that make faith reasonable before it is embraced. Today there are many such motives, among them loneliness, emptiness and even plain common sense. And believers know that without grace, none of it happens.
Weiss had taken the train to Princeton because “she wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. She continued, “I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing.”
What I saw in 2025
When I first wrote about this on Garvan Hill, the signs were already accumulating. Dioceses across Britain and Ireland reported sharp rises in catechumens, especially among people in their twenties and thirties. Birmingham had 201, up from 130 the year before, and nearly 70 joined at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. In the United States, the Diocese of Cleveland welcomed over 800 converts at Easter, about 50 per cent more than in 2024.
Two events from that summer stay with me. On 7 July, the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, celebrated Mass in Canterbury Cathedral to commemorate St Thomas Becket. It was the largest Catholic gathering there since the Reformation, and I was privileged to be present. At the end of the ceremony, attended by many people who were not Catholic, the internationally renowned Tenebrae choir sang two hymns, firstly the culminating hymn, the Gregorian chant setting of the Salve Regina. Secondly as a recessional, the quintessentially English anthem, Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s Jerusalem.
Then there was Chartres, where thousands of young Europeans walked sixty miles from Paris over three days at Pentecost. Sadly, I was not there, but Rod Dreher was, who first felt the reality of God there as a teenager in 1984, watched the sunburned pilgrims stream into the nave and thought, “These are the people who are going to save Christianity in Europe.” He allowed that it might be fanciful – but clearly his hope was palpable.
After Charlie Kirk
The killing of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 brought another surge of interest. Catholic campus ministry leaders told the Catholic News Agency they were seeing bigger crowds at Mass, with some schools reporting increases of 15 per cent, and many students asking basic questions: what is evil, and how does God allow this? Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, was struck by the size and dignity of the Arizona memorial and compared it to John Paul II’s first visit to America in 1979.
Communion, not just communication
None of this proves a lasting revival. Conversion numbers rise and fall, and enthusiasm in a crowd is not the same as faith over a lifetime. But the pattern across France, Britain, Ireland and the United States is hard to wave away. Christians might remember that on the Day of Pentecost, as recorded in Acts 2, approximately 3,000 people were converted and baptized, marking the birth of the Christian Church. It took a few hundred years to flourish, but those 3000 changed the world forever. It is still a work in progress.
What these young people describe again and again is loneliness, and a hunger for something more than the endless communication that leaves us more isolated. It is the distinction Allen Tate drew in the 1950s between communication and communion, which I wrote about recently. It may be that a generation raised on the first is discovering, in the oldest of places, a taste for the second.
