More than 21,000 adult and teenage baptisms in France. An average 38% increase across the U.S. dioceses surveyed. Catholics outnumbering Anglicans two to one among young British churchgoers. The numbers are on the table, they are verifiable, and they refute half a century of prophecies about the death of the Catholic Church.
A few months ago I began noticing something online. Not on Catholic channels — where enthusiasm is a foregone conclusion — but on the other ones. On serious Protestant channels, run by educated and respectable people, videos, articles and podcasts started appearing with a new tone. A tone somewhere between alarm, bewilderment and, in some cases, indignation. The titles repeated themselves with almost liturgical insistence: Why are young people going to Rome? Why do our children want liturgy? What is happening to Generation Z?
So I went to the numbers. What I found was not an impression, nor a pious rumor, nor the usual devout optimism. I found official statistics, episcopal surveys, independent sociological studies and reports from secular news agencies, all pointing in the same direction: something is happening in the Catholic Church that nobody — neither her friends nor her adversaries — saw coming.
This article is an attempt to tell that story with the data in hand. Without exaggeration. And also, as the reader will see, without hiding the uncomfortable figures or the limits of what the sources actually permit us to claim. Because the truth needs no makeup.
I. The Global Picture: 1.422 Billion
Let us begin at the top. The Pontifical Yearbook 2026 and the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2024, prepared by the Central Statistics Office of the Secretariat of State and released on 28 March 2026 by L’Osservatore Romano, record 1.422 billion baptized Catholics worldwide at the close of 2024, up from roughly 1.406 billion in 2023. A growth rate of 1.14%.
And here it is worth being exact from the very first line, because everything else in this article depends on it: the Holy See itself describes that growth as substantially in line with world population growth. Which is why the Catholic share of humanity holds steady at around 17.8%. This is not a global explosion. This is a Church holding her weight while the entire planet is transformed around her.
One in every six human beings alive today has been baptized in the Catholic Church. The continental breakdown is revealing:
- Africa grows by 2.7%, nearly five times the Asian rate and above the continent’s own demographic growth: from just over 281 million Catholics in 2023 to more than 288 million in 2024. Its weight within the universal Church rises from 19.9% to 20.3%.
- The Americas still account for 47.7% of all Catholics on earth.
- Europe declines slightly in relative weight (from 20.4% to 20.1%), yet Catholics still represent 39.7% of the European population.
- Oceania grows by 2.1%.
- Asia, where Catholics are barely 3.3% of the population, already contributes some 156 million faithful.
A necessary caveat about Africa, one that almost no Catholic article bothers to make: those seven additional million are not seven million adult converts. They are the combined result of a very young population, a high birth rate, infant baptism that remains the norm, and evangelization that remains active. It is real and splendid growth, but it is above all demographic. To confuse it with a wave of conversions would be dishonest.
There is also a figure almost nobody comments on: 2.9 million catechists and 463,079 lay missionaries (up 4.2% on the previous year). A civilian army, unordained and for the most part unpaid, sustaining the transmission of the faith across five continents. But the global figures, impressive as they are, are not the real news. The news lies elsewhere: in the West. Where the Church was supposed to be dying.
II. France: The Country That Stopped Being “the Eldest Daughter” — and Became It Again
France is the most spectacular case, and the best documented. Each year the French Bishops’ Conference (CEF) publishes its national survey on the catechumenate. The 2026 results, released on 25 March, are these: 13,234 adults and more than 8,100 teenagers will be baptized at the Easter Vigil. Total: 21,386 newly baptized.
That is 28% more adults than in 2025 and 10% more teenagers. An all-time record since records began.
With one methodological precision that the CEF itself emphasizes and that deserves respect: the teenagers were counted across 89 dioceses, 90% of French dioceses, and the bishops’ conference expressly warns that the count is not exhaustive, because not every diocese yet has a service that registers the teenage catechumenate. In other words: the real figure could be higher, not lower.
But the number to underline in red is this one: in 2016 there were 4,124 adults. In 2026 there are 13,234. The figure has more than tripled in ten years. And in 2021 the combined adult and teenage total was 4,895. In five years it has multiplied more than fourfold.
And who are they? Between January and March 2026 the CEF surveyed 1,450 catechumens across 60 dioceses. The profile demolishes every cliché:
- 42% are between 18 and 25 years old. Another 40% are between 26 and 40. The curve of young adults overtook that of older adults barely five years ago and has not stopped climbing.
- 40% point to a personal trial — illness, bereavement — as the trigger for a search for meaning.
- 34% cite the witness of Christians close to them.
- 32%, a powerful spiritual experience.
- Christian influencers account for barely 11%.
That last figure deserves a pause. Digital media matter — I shall return to that — but they are not manufacturing converts. They are opening doors. What walks through the door is something else entirely.
In the diocese of Autun, Cécile Jarry, who heads the catechumenate, describes the progression of accompaniers: 29 in 2023, 49 in 2024, 80 in 2026. In Lyon, Fr. Xavier Grillon, parish priest of Sainte-Blandine, celebrated 52 baptisms over a single Easter weekend. He had never done so many.
III. The United Kingdom: The Reversal Henry VIII Never Saw Coming
If France is the most spectacular case, the United Kingdom is the most symbolic.
In 2025 the Bible Society — an interdenominational body, not a Catholic one — published, together with YouGov, the study The Quiet Revival, based on more than 13,000 interviews across England and Wales. The results shook the British religious establishment:
| Monthly churchgoers | 2018 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Anglicans | 41% | 34% |
| Catholics | 23% | 31% |
| Pentecostals | 4% | 10% |
And among those aged 18 to 34 the reversal is dramatic: 41% Catholic against 20% Anglican (Anglicans were 30% in 2018). Among 18-to-24-year-olds, monthly attendance rose from 4% to 16% in six years.
The Times of London reported that Catholics outnumber Anglicans two to one among Gen Z churchgoers. The Daily Telegraph wrote of the extraordinary resurgence of the Catholic faith in Britain. And the website Anglican Ink asked, with notable honesty, the question that sums it all up: is England becoming Catholic again?
In a country where being Catholic cost dozens of martyrs their lives from 1534 onward, Catholicism is on course to become the largest practising denomination for the first time since the Reformation.
(In Northern Ireland, Catholics already outnumber the combined Protestant population according to the 2021 census. But that is not a matter of conversions: birth rates, migration and inherited family identity are doing the talking there. It is a historic datum, not a datum of this phenomenon.)
IV. The United States: 66 of 71 Dioceses Growing
In 2026 the National Catholic Register did something no agency had done: it contacted all 175 Latin-rite territorial dioceses in the United States, asking how many people would enter the Church at Easter. Seventy-one replied.
Let us say this plainly before quoting any figures: this is a journalistic survey, not a national census. The response rate was 40%. Some dioceses counted catechumens and candidates together; others counted only catechumens. The report itself acknowledges these methodological differences, and an honest reader must keep them in view.
With that caveat on the table, the result remains extraordinary: of the 71 dioceses that responded, sixty-six reported increases. Only five expected declines, most of them slight.
Some concrete cases:
- Los Angeles: 8,598 catechumens and candidates. An absolute record.
- Newark, New Jersey: 1,701 in 2026, against 1,305 in 2025 and 1,064 in 2019 — the pre-pandemic high. Sixty percent above that record.
- Washington, D.C.: more than 1,700 people, the highest number in fifteen years.
- Cleveland, Ohio: from 465 converts in 2023 to 1,029 in 2026. More than double.
- Boston: more than 680 catechumens, against 450 the previous year and a historic average of 250 to 300.
- Oklahoma City: from 635 to nearly 1,000. A 57% increase.
- Norwich, Connecticut: +112%. Pueblo, Colorado: +105%.
- Richmond, Virginia: 900 baptisms, a record.
The prayer app Hallow analysed the available data and calculated that the average diocese, among those surveyed, grew by 38% in people entering the Church compared with 2025. That is an average of the sample, not of the nation’s 175 dioceses.
On university campuses the phenomenon is denser still: 400 people in the OCIA program at Texas A&M, 163 at Notre Dame, and dozens of universities reporting similar figures. The New York Times — hardly a parish bulletin — ran a report on 26 March 2026 on the surge of converts in Roman Catholic churches.
Fr. Armand Mantia, director of Newark’s OCIA program, summed it up in a line that has since become famous: they assumed 2025 had been an unrepeatable anomaly — and then 2026 arrived and blew 2025 away.
V. And Everywhere Else
- Spain: according to the Annual Report of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, 13,323 people over the age of seven were baptized in 2024 — the only sacrament showing sustained growth. More than 14,000 are expected for 2026. Oviedo went from 365 catechumens to 390; Getafe reached 50, its highest figure on record; Navarre, 40, the highest in twenty years; Valencia doubled its Rite of Election, from 50 to more than 100 adults.
- Australia: Sydney is receiving a record number of catechumens. Melbourne is preparing to welcome 550 new Catholics, 57% more than last year — which had itself grown 40%. Archbishop Anthony Fisher has spoken of a “second spring” of faith.
- Norway: between 2015 and 2025 the Catholic population rose from 95,655 to 168,220. A 76% increase in one of Europe’s most secularized countries. That said: much of that leap is explained by immigration from Poland, Lithuania, the Philippines and Latin America, and it would be dishonest to present it as a wave of Nordic conversions. But not all of it is explained that way: Scandinavia is now discussing a “Catholic awakening,” and parishes have celebrated their first priestly ordination in five hundred years.
- The Netherlands: a 40% increase in adult conversions in 2024.
It is not one diocese. It is not one country. It is not one continent. It is simultaneous.
VI. Why? The Study That Dared to Ask
In June 2026 the Archdiocese of Chicago, together with twenty other U.S. dioceses, published the study Why Are So Many People Becoming Catholic? — 2,127 respondents who entered the Church that year, surveyed in English and Spanish between February and May. It is, to date, the most serious attempt to answer the question everyone is asking.
When these new Catholics were asked to rate what moved them:
| Motivation | % rating it strongly or most important |
|---|---|
| Exploring a deeper relationship with God | 84% |
| Growing in goodness and virtue | 77% |
| A deeper understanding of truth | 76% |
| Seeking greater inner peace | 72% |
| The Church’s sacred liturgy, ritual and sacraments | 68% |
| The longevity of the Church’s tradition over centuries | 66% |
| The wisdom of a two-thousand-year-old Church to help navigate life | 65% |
| The Church’s stance on social issues | 36% |
| Her position as the world’s largest provider of charitable services | 34% |
Read it again. Liturgy, antiquity and historical continuity weigh twice as heavily as politics and charity.
And here I must be precise, because the temptation to overstate is enormous. The study was not designed as an experiment comparing pastoral models. It does not demonstrate that modernizing language or investing in social action drives young people away; to use it that way would be to force it. What it does say, with a clarity I find theologically arresting — and this is my reading, not the researchers’ conclusion — is what the people who actually came through the door valued: the ancient, the solemn, the true, the unchanged.
For decades we were told that the rite had to be lightened to attract the young. The young who arrived did not say that.
The study identified five convert profiles. One of them, representing 20% of the sample, was labeled by the researchers the Tradition-seeking Convert. The description is striking: predominantly male, predominantly from Protestant backgrounds, arriving by intellectual and media-driven pathways rather than relational ones. Among them, the search for truth scores 87%, the longevity of tradition 82%, and the wisdom of the two-thousand-year-old Church 84%. Thirty-five percent consume apologetics content.
Another historic datum: only 26% cited dating or marrying a Catholic as part of their journey. In 2007, according to Pew data analysed by CARA, that figure was 72%. The methodologies are not identical and the authors themselves say so, but the magnitude of the change is too great to ignore: marriage has ceased to be the principal doorway. Many still arrive through a courtship, a friendship, a family witness — and God be praised for it. But today, alongside them, a multitude is arriving that came alone, in search of the truth.
And a third datum: 28% of those who entered came from religious nothingness — agnostics, atheists, “nothing in particular.” These are not lukewarm Catholics returning. These are people arriving out of the desert.
VII. The Digital Continent: When History Became One Click Away
This is where I want to linger, because I believe it is the sociological key to the whole phenomenon.
Sixty-six percent of the Chicago respondents spontaneously named digital content that had been meaningful on their journey of faith: the Hallow app (15%), Fr. Mike Schmitz and Ascension Presents (14%), the Bible in a Year podcast (8%), Bishop Robert Barron and Word on Fire (6%), Pints with Aquinas (5%), Trent Horn (4%). Twenty percent simply said “Catholic social media.”
For centuries, theological formation was the privilege of seminaries, libraries and universities. To learn who St. Ignatius of Antioch was, or what the Council of Nicaea actually decided, or how Irenaeus of Lyons argued apostolic continuity, one needed access to sources the ordinary faithful simply did not have.
That is over.
Today an eighteen-year-old with a phone in his hand can ask an artificial intelligence — Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, any of them — when the phrase “Catholic Church” first appears in Christian literature. And in seconds he has the answer: in St. Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Smyrnaeans, in the early second century — around the year 107, by the traditional dating, though specialists work with somewhat different ranges. That is barely a generation after the last apostle. He can ask about the succession of the bishops of Rome, and he will find that Irenaeus of Lyons recorded it around the year 180 precisely as an argument for apostolic continuity: more than a century before Constantine was born.
And with that, one of the most frequently repeated apologetic edifices of the last five centuries collapses: the notion that “the Catholic Church was invented by Constantine in 313.”
No serious historian — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or agnostic — holds this. Constantine legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan and convoked the Council of Nicaea in 325. He founded nothing. He found a Church already nearly three hundred years old, with bishops, Eucharistic liturgy, a canon in formation, martyrs, a catechumenate and a sacramental structure. The documentation is abundant, accessible and now free.
For generations that claim worked because whoever heard it had no way of checking it. Today he checks it on the bus, on his way to work. And when he discovers he was told something that cannot survive ten minutes of scrutiny, he does not merely change his mind on that point: he begins to wonder what else he was told.
The digital revolution converted no one. What it did was strip error of its monopoly on information.
VIII. The Reaction: Why So Much Unease
And now we come to the most delicate point of this article, which I want to treat with precision and without caricature.
Is the Protestant world “furious”? The honest answer is: the Protestant world is reacting, and it is reacting in very different ways.
There is a calm and self-critical reaction, and it is the most numerous and the most dignified. Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine, published an analysis acknowledging the sustained trend of Protestants moving to Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and identifying among the causes disillusionment with abuse scandals in evangelical institutions, distaste for the corporatization of megachurches and the “celebrity pastor” model, and a longing for more reverent liturgy and sacraments. Britain’s Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, commenting on the Bible Society report, reached a conclusion no Catholic could have phrased better: the churches in decline are those that abandoned the gospel for a culturally accommodating liberalism, or those that became shallow and lightweight; people want substance, not superficiality.
There is a theological and reasoned reaction. The Aquila Report and TruthScript, Reformed publications, have run serious essays arguing that the phenomenon proves the Reformation remains as pertinent as ever. That is a respectable position and it deserves to be debated respectfully.
And there is, certainly, an angry reaction. In May 2026 a Reformed podcast devoted an entire episode to explaining why Gen Z men are going to Rome, and its thesis was that the Catholic Church is a cult that has spent a thousand years perfecting carnal techniques to make people feel spiritual. YouTube today is full of videos denouncing the “aestheticization” of faith, the seduction of incense, the danger of beauty.
It is that last register which I personally find most revealing. Because it concedes, without meaning to, exactly what the Chicago study documents: that young people are coming for the liturgy, for the tradition, for the historical continuity and for the beauty. The diagnosis is correct. Only the value judgment differs.
And there is something else, something that explains the unease better than any statistic. For decades, certain pulpits announced the imminent collapse of the Church of Rome. She was called a dying institution; her churches would empty; the Vatican would become a museum. And today, according to the Chicago study, one in three of those entering the Catholic Church comes from another Christian tradition — 34% — and a quarter of the total were actively practising it. That is not a majority. But it is a proportion no community can afford to ignore.
It is not rage, I think. Honestly, I think it is grief. And grief deserves compassion, not mockery.
IX. What the Data Do NOT Say (and Must Be Said)
This is where an honest Catholic article parts company with propaganda.
First: the Catholic Church still loses more people in the West than she gains. A Pew Research Center analysis of “religious switching” is devastating on this point: in the United States, for every convert to Catholicism there are about 8.4 people raised Catholic who no longer identify as such. Among Protestants the ratio is 1.8 to 1. Converts make up barely 8% of American Catholics and around 1.5% of all U.S. adults. The net balance remains sharply negative for us.
Second: global baptisms fell. The Annuarium 2024 records 13,065,918 newly baptized worldwide, a –0.6% change on the previous year. First Communions are up (+1.1%, 9,194,143) and Confirmations too (+1.7%, 7,823,882), but infant baptism is falling, and falling hard, across Western Europe. The adult boom is real, but it is offsetting a hemorrhage, not crowning a triumph.
Third: priestly vocations are declining. Students of philosophy and theology fell from 106,495 in 2023 to 103,604 in 2024: a drop of 2.72%. There are 407,421 priests in the world — barely 425 more than the year before — for 1.422 billion faithful. And professed women religious, 589,423, continue to decline globally.
Fourth: Protestants are also growing on some metrics. The Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in the United States — reported in May 2026 its lowest membership since 1973 (12.3 million, –3%), but at the same time weekly attendance rose by nearly 4% (4.5 million) and baptisms grew 5%, to 263,075, exceeding pre-pandemic levels for the second consecutive year. In the United Kingdom, Pentecostals went from 4% to 10% of churchgoers: proportionally, they grew more than Catholics did.
Fifth: sociology counsels caution. Pew’s 2025 Religious Landscape Study concluded that the decline of Christianity in the United States “has slowed and may have leveled off,” but warned that Generation Z remains far less religious than its predecessors: only 45–46% identify as Christian. What we have, strictly speaking, is a pause in secularization with a very lively upsurge at the margins — not a reconquest.
I say all this because a Catholic should fear no number. Our faith does not depend on polling. But whoever builds his hope on badly read data builds it on sand.
So what exactly can we affirm? This — and it is no small thing:
In specific Western countries and dioceses, adult catechumens are entering the Church at levels without documented precedent in the modern era, and a very significant proportion of these new Catholics come from other Christian communities.
It is not a global reversal of the flow. The net balance remains against us. But it is the first serious crack in a sixty-year trend. And in the history of the Church, cracks tend to be where the light gets in.
X. The Work That Holds the World Together
There is one column where the figures speak for themselves. According to data published by the Fides Agency for the 99th World Mission Sunday (October 2025), the Catholic Church runs worldwide:
- 103,951 health, charitable and welfare institutions, including 5,377 hospitals, 13,895 dispensaries and 504 leprosaria.
- 15,566 homes for the elderly, the chronically ill and people with disabilities.
- 102,455 primary schools with 36,199,844 pupils.
- More than 74,000 preschool centers serving 7.6 million children.
- 10,827 marriage counselling centers and 3,147 social rehabilitation centers.
Five thousand hospitals. Thirty-six million children in classrooms. Five hundred leprosaria — in the twenty-first century, caring for a disease the world had written off.
This places the Catholic Church among the largest non-state networks of health care, education and charitable assistance on the planet. A rigorous comparison with the Red Cross and Red Crescent, the major international NGOs or global private education networks would require a homogeneous study I do not pretend to undertake here. But the scale speaks for itself. And it happens every single day, across more than a thousand mission ecclesiastical circumscriptions, most of them in Africa (530) and Asia.
When someone asks why the Church is still standing after two thousand years, the theological answer is the promise of Christ. But the visible answer, the one anyone can verify, is in those figures.
XI. Toward 2033
We are approaching a threshold no generation before ours could contemplate: the bimillennium of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord. Historical chronology places the crucifixion between AD 30 and 33; if the most widely held dating is correct, 2033 will mark two thousand years since Good Friday and the empty tomb.
Two thousand years. And the Church that flowed from the pierced side of Christ and was manifested to the world at Pentecost — so faith confesses, and here I speak as a believer, not as a statistician — not only exists: she baptizes thirteen million people a year, sustains five thousand hospitals, educates thirty-six million children, and has just registered in France the highest number of adult catechumens in her modern history.
Empires have fallen. Ideologies that proclaimed themselves eternal have fallen. The prophecies of those who announced her funeral with a date and an hour have fallen. And she is still here, with the same words of the Last Supper, spoken this morning on countless altars and in every language of the world.
XII. The Children Who Bring Their Parents
I will end with what moves me most in all of this. And I present it for what it is: a pastoral observation, not a datum. It appears in no table and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
For centuries the transmission of faith ran in one direction: parents brought their children to church. It was the natural order of things.
Today, more and more parish priests report the opposite. In parishes in Paris, in London, in Chicago, in Madrid, in Sydney. A twenty-two-year-old discovers the faith on his own — through a podcast, through a personal trial, through a liturgy he wandered into out of curiosity — and a few months later he turns up at the Easter Vigil with his parents behind him. Parents who were baptized as infants and never came back. Parents who learned that God exists because their son told them.
If this is confirmed by serious research, it will be one of the most important sociological findings of the century. For now it is simply what those of us in the trenches are seeing.
And it has something of the dynamism of Pentecost about it: it happens by surprise, and it disconcerts those who believed they had a complete map of the religious world.
Let no one take offence at my saying so. I do not write this against any Christian community. I write with immense respect for every Protestant brother who loves Christ and reads His Word, and with the conviction that true ecumenism is done with the truth on the table, not under it.
I am only reporting what the numbers say. And the numbers say that they are coming back.
And to each one of them, with all the tenderness I am capable of, I want to say what the Church has been saying at the door of the baptistery for twenty centuries:
Welcome home.
Do you feel this path calling you too? If you wish to be part of an international, virtual community of laypeople and priests committed to the Catholic faith, to Christian knighthood and to the evangelization of the digital continent, you can share this adventure with the Brotherhood of Knights and Dames of the Most Holy Trinity. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
Note on Method
This article draws on three kinds of sources, of differing evidentiary weight, and the reader has a right to know which is which:
- Official Holy See statistics (Pontifical Yearbook and Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae): these are ecclesiastical censuses, with the margin of error inherent in a global collection of diocesan self-reported data.
- Episcopal surveys and sociological studies (French Bishops’ Conference, Bible Society/YouGov, Archdiocese of Chicago, Pew Research Center): these have published methodologies and defined margins of error. The Chicago study surveys only people who have already entered the Church; it describes their motivations, not those of the general population, and it does not compare pastoral models.
- Journalistic surveys and diocesan reports (National Catholic Register, Catholic news agencies): valuable as indicators and as a composite portrait, but not censuses. The Register survey had a 40% response rate and non-uniform counting criteria across dioceses.
Growth figures for Africa and the Nordic countries are largely a function of demography and migration, not conversions alone, and this has been noted in the text.
All figures cited were current as of July 2026.
Sources
Official Holy See data
- Annuario Pontificio 2026 and Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2024, Central Statistics Office of the Secretariat of State. Released by L’Osservatore Romano, 28 March 2026. Coverage: Vatican News, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2026-03/new-data-from-annuario-pontificio-2026-shows-catholics-growing.html
- Spanish-language coverage with sacramental figures: https://www.vaticannews.va/es/vaticano/news/2026-03/publicado-nuevos-datos-del-anuario-pontificio-2026.html
- Fides Agency, Catholic Church Statistics 2025, 99th World Mission Sunday, October 2025. https://press.vatican.va/content/dam/salastampa/it/fuori-bollettino/pdf/ES%20-%20Estad%C3%ADsticas%20de%20la%20Iglesia%20cat%C3%B3lica%202025.pdf
France
- French Bishops’ Conference, Enquête du catéchuménat 2026. https://catechese.catholique.fr/actualites-initiatives/actualites/338428-enquete-du-catechumenat-2026-les-baptemes-adultes-et-adolescents-en-chiffres/
- Église catholique en France, adult baptisms. https://eglise.catholique.fr/approfondir-sa-foi/la-celebration-de-la-foi/les-sacrements/le-bapteme/baptemes-adultes/
- RCF, testimonies and diocesan figures. https://www.rcf.fr/articles/actualite/catechumenes-a-paques-un-record-historique-de-baptemes-en-2026
United Kingdom
- Bible Society / YouGov, The Quiet Revival (2025). Analysis and figures: https://fiec.org.uk/resources/the-quiet-revival-growth-in-the-uk-church
- Catholic Herald, on The Times coverage. https://thecatholicherald.com/article/catholics-set-to-exceed-anglicans-among-churchgoers-for-first-time-since-reformation
- National Catholic Register, “Britain’s Quiet Catholic Revival.” https://www.ncregister.com/news/edward-pentin-uk-quiet-catholic-revival
United States
- National Catholic Register, survey of 175 dioceses. https://www.ncregister.com/news/catholic-converts-surge-us
- Archdiocese of Chicago with twenty other dioceses, Why Are So Many People Becoming Catholic?, 18 June 2026. https://www.archchicago.org/documents/d/aoc/ocia-report-1
- Archdiocese of Newark, press release. https://www.insidernj.com/press-release/archdiocese-of-newark-experiencing-record-high-number-of-catholic-conversions-in-2026/
International picture
- Aleteia, “2026 convert boom: Where around the world? And why?” https://aleteia.org/2026/04/03/2026-convert-boom-where-around-the-world-and-why/
- Spain: El Debate, https://www.eldebate.com/religion/20260227/14000-adultos-preparan-espana-bautizarse-grupo-grande-20-anos_389884.html ; Religión en Libertad, https://www.religionenlibertad.com/espana/260222/boom-bautismos-jovenes-adultos-espana-duplican-valencia-record-getafe-navarra_116691.html ; El Confidencial Digital, https://www.elconfidencialdigital.com/religion/articulo/conferencia-episcopal/bautismo-adultos-espana-crecimiento-desigual-diocesis-semana-santa-pascua/20260429055526056306.html
Comparative and critical data
- Pew Research Center, Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off (2025). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
- Pew Research Center, Religious Switching. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-switching/
- Pew Research Center, data on Catholic converts in the U.S. (June 2026). https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/05/vance-is-among-1-5-of-americans-who-have-converted-to-catholicism/
- Lifeway Research / Southern Baptist Convention, 2025 annual report published May 2026, via AP. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/05/05/southern-baptist-membership/
Reactions from the Protestant world
- Christianity Today, “Some Evangelicals Are Leaving Protestantism for Other Traditions.” https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/08/protestant-conversions-roman-catholicism-eastern-orthodoxy/
- The Aquila Report, “Why Protestants Are Converting to Roman Catholicism.” https://theaquilareport.com/why-protestants-are-converting-to-roman-catholicism/
- TruthScript, same title. https://truthscript.com/theology/why-protestants-are-converting-to-roman-catholicism/
- The Conquering Truth Podcast, ep. 262 (May 2026). https://theconqueringtruth.com/2026/05/why-are-gen-z-men-are-converting-to-roman-catholicism-ep-262/