Everybody’s talking about the surge in conversion and church attendance. Here’s a take from The Washington Post:
The 6 p.m. Sunday Mass at St. Joseph’s — or “St. Joe’s,” as its habitués call it — has become a hub for New York City’s young Catholics, its pews full of young women wearing sweater sets and silver cross necklaces and young men with biceps straining against the sleeves of their polo shirts.
“A huge selling point is finding a potential partner,” said [Anthonoy] Gross, though he was “rolling solo.”
“The joke is that St. Joe’s is the ultimate place to date Catholic in New York because it’s all the young, beautiful people that go there,” said Thomas L., 24, a parishioner who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name and last initial because his work involves sensitive government contracts.
If you want a seat, you’d better get there early. By 5:45 p.m., all 850 seats were occupied. People too late to get standing spots craned their necks from the steps outside.
The Rev. Boniface Endorf, the pastor at St. Joe’s, estimated that attendance had increased by 20 percent in the past six months. From 2021 through 2024, the number of people receiving their first sacraments at Easter — baptism, First Communion or confirmation — remained steady, between 13 and 16 annually. In 2025, 35 people received sacraments. This year, the church is expecting 88.
A year and a half ago, if 60 people stayed for the church’s wine social after a Sunday evening service, it was a good night. These days, they average about 200 people.
So why are young people flocking to St. Joe’s?
“Our culture pushes that the meaning of life is consumerism and career,” Father Endorf said. “And they’re looking for something more than what they can produce and what they can buy.”
Attendees offered a variety of other explanations: Church was a much-needed IRL “third space” for the terminally online; it afforded meaningful connection and the potential to turn those connections into serious relationships; in an ugly and inauthentic world, Catholicism offered beauty and tradition. A few people credited conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death as a catalyst. (Kirk was not Catholic, but some associates of his have said that he was exploring Catholicism before he was killed.) …
And there’s this:
Thomas L. defined the “theo-bro” as “the extremely online religious man — that usually is a convert — who experiences the faith in either a rules-based or power-based understanding rather than a service- and community-based understanding.”
That’s basically how Clavicular — a 20-year-old internet personality obsessed with physical beauty and blasé about racial slurs — described Catholicism to the influencer Alex Eubank between weightlifting sets during a live stream: “Why I became Catholic in the first place is I really liked the order it followed, right? It’s having some sort of authority that I believe to be one that’s virtuous, kind of keeping people in line.”
Thomas L. thinks attitudes like this miss the point. “From the beginning, the [Catholic] church has been hospitals, it has been outreach, it has cared about the people that no one would touch, the lepers of society, right?” he said.
“I’m afraid that that’s something that maybe some of the Catholic gym bros might be missing,” he added.
