On April 14, noted public Catholic intellectual Robert George posted on X, “Something’s happening. It’s happening in France. It’s happening in England. It’s happening in the U.S. I only began noticing it a few weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday. It seems awfully sudden, so perhaps it’s just a blip. If so, though, it’s a widespread blip.”
George was referencing the announcement by the Catholic Church in France that 10,384 adult catechumens will be received into the church this Easter, marking a 45 percent increase from 2024. Of those, 42 percent are in the 18-25 age group.
In April, the British Bible Society released an extensive report that showed church attendance in Britain has increased 55 percent since 2018. A surprising statistic was that of the 16 percent of people aged 18-24 who regularly attend church, 41 percent were Catholics. The Catholic Herald led with the headline: “Catholics set to exceed Anglicans for first time since Reformation due to younger churchgoers.”
Though there has been no official cross-country report, Canadian priests are saying that something similar might be occurring in Canada.
Fr. Troy Nguyen is chaplain of St. Francis Xavier Chaplaincy based at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Calgary, AB and a member of the diocesan presbyteral council.
Nguyen says that 400 adults will be baptised this Easter in the diocese, significantly higher than the five-year average. But Nguyen said the numbers of people attending Mass is the metric he is most surprised by. Even in the last four months, there has been growth.
“I’ve seen an uptick in Mass attendance, particularly among the young adults. On Palm Sunday, it was crazy. The cathedral can hold a thousand people, and it was not completely full, but it was full.”
Fr. Harrison Ayre is pastor of St. Peter’s Nanaimo, BC, and, like Nguyen, has also seen rapid recent growth at his parish.
At the beginning of 2024, the parish would see 650 people on a weekend.
“Just this past January, the parish was at a 1000 on the weekend; now we’re at 1100,” Ayre said.
It isn’t just at Mass that the parish has seen growth. The number of adult catechumens is up, attendance at the parish youth group is up and on Apr. 8, when Ayre organized a kind of 12-hour confession-palooza, the parish parking lot was full.
Instead of the standard two-hour reconciliation service, Ayre decided to try “something different” this Lent, and kept the church open for 12 hours, scheduling local priests to be on hand to hear confessions.
Ayre said he expected somewhere between 100 to 130 people to show up, and told the priests, “bring a book, you might have some dead time.”
There was no “dead time.” Instead, people started lining up 15 minutes before the confessionals were officially opened, the last absolution was given at 11:15 p.m., and the final count was 225 people.
“I think it’s going to be one of those days that will be a long-term memory for me as a priest. My heart was full,” said Ayre.
At St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Shrine in Ottawa, Fr. Deacon Andrew Bennett reports that the last five years has seen, “a significant increase in the number of young people showing up consistently every weekend at our parish.”
“We hold a vesper service every Saturday evening. Five years ago, if we got 30 people at Vespers, that was pretty good. Now I would guess we’re getting between 60 and 70 consistently,” Bennett noted.
All of this is taking place in highly secular cities. Ayre says that Nanaimo is considered the most secular city in Canada. Statistics Canada data shows that nearly 63 percent of Nanaimo residents identify as having no religious affiliation.
In Quebec, where Premier François Legault is determined to pass legislation to ban public prayer, nearly 4000 people marched through the streets of Montreal on April 12 for a “Palm Saturday Walk.”
Isabel Correa, Director of Youth Ministry at the Archdiocese of Montreal, said her team was “blown away” by the numbers.
“We used to have a Palm Saturday Walk, but we stopped for the pandemic. The young people kept asking for it, so last year we tested the grounds to see if the interest was still there. Last year we were about 750 for the walk, but this year we went viral!”
The rapidity with which the numbers are rising defy a tidy explanation, but Nguyen began with the obvious: “God’s grace is moving, and the Holy Spirit is inspiring people’s hearts.”
“The crazy part is this is all happening without overt evangelization,” said Ayre.
All three clerics report there is a common theme expressed by the young people who are walking in the doors of the church. Most seem to be searching for the transcendentals: truth, beauty and goodness.
Nguyen says that Generation Z, now 13 to 28 years old, have been largely raised without God.
“Their Millennial parents have lived without faith and Gen Z have grown up without any sense of God. They’ve tried it, and it’s not great. They’re experiencing depression, fear and anxiety; living according to the secular world and usually living according to a nihilistic worldview.”
Bennett says this secular background has led many people to seek something different.
“What I think is drawing people, especially those who are in university, is they realize that what they’re being given is thin gruel, and they are looking for meaning. They want beauty, they want truth. I think it’s those parishes that offer a rich liturgical life and solid faith formation programs for young adults that are seeing this growth. I travel a lot across the country, and that is what I’m seeing,” said Bennett.
‘Beauty is a big thing,” said Ayre. “We do beautiful liturgy here. I’m a man of the church. I do what the church asks me to do, allows me to do, but I make sure we do it well and beautifully.”
Bennett describes how the Ukrainian Catholic liturgy can provide freedom from the constraints and burdens of modern life.
“One of young men has been at our parish for a few years really loves the liturgy. I asked him, ‘What is it? What is it about the liturgy that you love?’ And he said, ‘When I’m in the liturgy, I’m free. I’m free, because liturgy is not about me. It’s not about my feeling. It’s not about my need for therapy or my need for entertainment. It’s about Jesus Christ.’”
This year, as thousands of adults across the country approach baptismal fonts at the Easter Vigil to make their individual profession of faith, they will do so as part of much larger group, in Canada and across the globe, who are finding the source of truth, goodness, and beauty in the Catholic Church.
(Note: A slightly different version of this article was published in The Catholic Register on April 15, 2025, and is printed here with permission of the author.)
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