This past April the New York Post ran an article on people, particularly young people in their 20s and 30s, converting to the Catholic Faith. Some are former atheists, some coming from Protestant denominations and other returning to the faith after straying away from their Catholic upbringing. The article featured a profile on Sydney (NO…not THAT Sydney!) Johnston. Sydney, in her 30s, lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Growing up in California she was raised in a Non-denomination Christian household. Feeling that the faith was mostly a cultural experience, rather than one rooted in history and the spirit, she walked away from it all together in her 20s. During the COVID pandemic she had time to reflect on her workaholic lifestyle and realizing something was missing in her life. She turned back to the Bible and found wisdom in its pages. Once lockdown was over, she began exploring different religions searching for God’s presence. She found it in the Catholic Mass.
Adrian Lawson considered himself to be an atheist in his teens, though he was raised as a non-denominational Christian. He battelled with depression and life’s meaning. He turned to the evangelical church to help him with his issues and found he became less self-centered and had a resolution to his mental illness. He found Catholicism after viewing online video debates between Catholics and Protestants. Ultimately pulling the trigger on conversion after watching the public conversion to Catholicism of online Christian influencer, Cameron Bertuzzi.
According to the National Catholic Register, some dioceses are reporting year-over-year increases of 30% to 70% in new converts. The Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, for instance, experienced a 72% jump in converts just from 2023 to 2024. Globally, the Catholic population increased by 1.15% from 2022-2023. While that seems like a small percentage, remember that there are around 1.4 BILLION Catholics in the world and 1.15% represents a little over 16 million people. Not chump change. What are some of the reasons people, especially millennials and Gen Z, are coming home to Catholicism. A survey on Reddit generated these responses: the truth in the history of the Church, the tradition and the sacraments, a sense of peace in the Church that goes against the deterioration of the culture, and some say the Catholic Church is Counter-Cultural. How about that? Counter-Cultural. The Catholic Church!
In today’s first reading we read how Zechariah confronted a young man who was measuring the size of the city of Jerusalem. Zechariah’s visions occurred just after the Babylonian exile where many of the exiled Israelites had decided to make Babylon home and remained there even when given the permission to return to Jerusalem and to the reconstruction of the city’s walls led by Ezra and Nehemiah. God tells the prophet that He will protect Zion with an encircling wall of fire. NOT a physical wall that has limits. But a wall of fire that is infinite. And not only will be be protecting and encircling the exiles from Babylon but the new city of Jerusale4m will be home to many nations. Jew and non-Jew alike. The young man in Zechariah’s vision was measuring the city to see if it would be big enough to hold all that would be coming. God says to him:
Sing and rejoice, O daughter Zion!
See, I am coming to dwell among you, says the LORD.
It will be Jesus the Messiah who welcomes great multitudes of every race and nation, Jew and Gentle, to the holy city. The City of God. We are not limited as a Church. Our doors are open to all. Fallen away Catholics. Faithful Catholics. Protestants. Atheists. Muslim and Jew. But mostly the Church is open to sinners. To hypocrites. To the broken. To the searching. To those looking for stability in the teaching of the truth. To you and I.
