Is the Church dying or reviving?

What is going on in the Church in America? Is She singing a swan song, or is She rising again from the ashes like the legendary phoenix?

In the spirit of legendary Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” allow me to answer the latter question with a firm “Yes.”

On the side of Catholic decline-and-dying, many dioceses have made stunning announcements of parish closures and consolidations over the last few years. The most recent news in the Archdiocese of Dubuque was particularly dire. The diocese, which counts around 182,000 Catholics, has announced that its current 163 parishes will be reorganized into 24 “pastorates.” Practically speaking, there will be no regular Masses at 84 of the parishes.

Given the priestly numbers (69 active diocesan and 23 religious priests), some may be tempted to say this is just a matter of an Iowan clerical shortage. In reality, there is also a laity shortage. Nor is it just in Dubuque.

The Pew Research Center has reported for years that the number of people coming into the Church is tiny compared to the number going out (meaning formally leaving the Catholic Church by switching to other Christian groups or leaving Christian faith altogether). For years, their Religious Landscape Study showed the ratio at 6.5 people leaving for each one person entering. In their 2023-24 edition, released earlier this year, this ratio was calculated at 8.4 leaving for each one entering.

Add to this the fact that, even among those still identifying as Catholics, the numbers receiving sacraments, including the sacrament of marriage, have tumbled. The most recent edition of Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) “Frequently Requested Statistics” chart shows data from 1965 to 2025. The declines from 1965 are truly stunning and catastrophic. For instance, in 1965, 1.237 million infants were baptized and over 347 thousand marriages were celebrated in the U.S. By 2025, those numbers were around 472 thousand and 107 thousand, respectively.

Those declines did not simply happen in the late 1960s maelstrom, either. Even in 2015, there were still 693 thousand infant baptisms and 148 thousand marriages. The Church in America has been shrinking and shrinking quickly in absolute numbers.

That’s why, when the news stories of conversions in numbers greater than anyone has seen in the last two decades started to hit around Easter time, many people cast a skeptical eye at them. How could the Church really be taking in so many people?

Even in publications not notably sympathetic to the Catholic Church, the titles were unusually exuberant about a development most of their staff were unlikely to approve personally. The New York Times published a piece titled “Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of Converts.” A 60 Minutes episode used the “r” word in its episode “Catholic conversions rising: Inside the Catholic Church’s quiet revival.”

Intriguingly, many publications highlighted the fact that this surge, revival even, was not simply hordes of unwashed masses trudging off to Mass to numb their poor, uneducated, and uncool lives. One article blared, “NYC’s Hottest New Club Is Catholic Mass.” There, author Brea O’Donnell painted Catholicism in the Big Apple as less Calvary and more Calvin Klein: “Packed pews. Standing room only. 20-and-30-somethings and beyond in their prettiest spring dresses and young men in pressed collared shirts and button-downs, lingering long after the service ends to talk, laugh, and swap Instagram handles. It’s an energy that’s warm and intoxicating… even without the bottomless mimosas.”

That article appeared in Evie, a magazine founded by Catholics and styling itself as a “conservative Cosmo,” so we might see a bit of special pleading. Pro-Catholic bias or not, they must have been reporting somewhat accurately since the Washington Post itself highlighted not only the numbers of people coming into the Church but also their extraordinarily young, good-looking, hip, and even male make-up in an article titled “Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.” The subtitle of the article is probably pretty accurate in its assessment of motives for seeking Christ’s Church: “Young men in their 20s and 30s are increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church as they seek truth, beauty and, yes, girlfriends.”

Indeed, something is happening. Nor is this merely a phenomenon of young, good-looking Manhattanites—or even just the young and good-looking anywhere. You may find this writer impious to have spent so much time on social media on Easter Sunday, but be assured that he spent a lot of time typing “Welcome home! Deo gratias!” to countless individuals around the country announcing their reception into the Church. That was after attending the Easter Vigil at his own parish, where 31 catechumens were baptized and confirmed, while another dozen or so candidates were confirmed.

When the dust—or, rather, the incense—cleared, an awful lot of newly minted Catholics were visible. An analysis by the prayer app Hallow showed a 38% increase from 2025 in the number of catechumens and candidates confirmed, with some dioceses such as Duluth and Pittsburgh recording growth exceeding 100%. Jonathan Liedl, managing editor of the National Catholic Register, predicted that when all the numbers are counted, 2026 might have seen around 160 thousand adults received—more people than were received in 2005!

How can both trends be happening at the same time? The answer is probably obvious to most Catholics who have been around for a while. When we talk about people formally “leaving the Church,” we are generally talking about people who were not really in it much in the first place. Many were CEO (Christmas Easter Only) Catholics at best. They were often neither evangelized nor catechized within their families and their parishes. Is it any surprise that they now consider themselves something other than Catholic? Or even nothing?

To be clear, even baptized Catholics who never darken the Church’s door are still Catholics. We take Christ at His word, accepting that those baptized have had the very Divine Life poured into them, whether it has produced visible fruit or not.

For a very long time, the Church in America has been operating under the assumption that the Church’s internal institutions—for example, our local parishes—are what we believe the Church as the Body of Christ to be: immovable and destined to last forever. The dominant mindset in far too many parishes, schools, institutions, and even dioceses has been what I like to call Suburban Rite Catholicism.

What this term designates has nothing to do with the location of any particular parish. Beautiful old parishes in cities and small towns can have gorgeous stained glass and still be places where Suburban Rite Catholicism is dominant. The term indicates a faith that is stripped of the fullness, complication, and difficulty of real faith and life in Christ. While the words of the liturgy contain a path to the radical claims of Catholic faith wherever and whenever the Mass is celebrated, they are rarely preached, explained, or presented within that liturgy in a manner that is convincing and convicting. Too often, the end result is that Catholicism is presented as a generically moralistic and therapeutic faith attached to some dull rituals. Neither spiritual intimacy with Christ nor the intellectual depth of the Tradition is presented or sometimes even seen.

Those returning to the Church are often those who have discovered some of the elements of the faith outside the Church and have discovered that Christ in His fullness resides in the Catholic Church—even if this was not clear to them before. These reverts and many of the converts are often drawn to Catholicism by the great saints, thinkers, and artists of the Church.

What often tipped them over the edge, however, was discovering the faith presented to them in its full strength by people who believe and act as if they believe. They want to hear the truth. In a National Catholic Register article, Kayla Bartsch describes the appeal of those Manhattan parishes getting publicity as having less to do with hipness and more to do with truth. These parishes “take the cultural questions of our time as seriously as they take the metaphysical questions of all time, often illuminating how the latter hold the key to the former.”

Those entering the Church also want to see Catholicism’s beauty. In the Washington Post article, convert priest Fr. Dwight Longenecker reports that young men—and, presumably, young women—entering the Church want “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.” “In other words,” he says, “they want it to look and sound Catholic.”

Just so. For now, the Church is dying—shrinking in terms of ultimate numbers. But, where Catholic life, preaching, and worship are blooming, the smaller numbers are still signs of true revival. Pray that the Lord would give us the strength to manifest Christ’s life so that others might seek it out.

(Editor’s note: This article appeared originally in The Catholic Servant and is reprinted with their kind permission.)