Ours is a broken world, fragmented, digital, and virtual. Language is often twisted to obscure rather than illuminate. Words are weighted with enough meanings to sink them into meaninglessness. “Your truth” and “my truth” compete for victimhood status. The only remaining sin of our modern age is to actually believe in sin. The nightly narrative, impersonating truth, spills into our phones and living rooms, normalizing the never-ending cultural revolution which seeks to convince you that human life, itself an accidental blight on a meaningless planet, is a mere commodity.

With all social indicators affixed on Hell being our destination, something funny happened on the way to apocalypse – a trend as improbable as it is significant. Many, especially the young, are turning or returning to the Catholic Church.

This is not mere wishful thinking.

Premier Christianity, the UK’s leading Christian magazine published a piece titled, “#TradCath: Why Gen Z rebellion means converting to Catholicism.”

The Washington Post was distraught that “JD Vance’s Catholic conversion is part of young conservative movement.”

Ruslan, a popular Protestant YouTuber, recently discussed the rising number of protestants converting to Catholicism.

They all ask the same question – Why?

Actor Shia Lebouf, when asked why he converted to Catholicism, said that when attending the Latin Mass, it differed from other Christian services, “because it feels like they’re not selling me a car.”

Candace Owens, according to Crisis Magazine, credited God with guiding her heart toward Truth. Capital T. No possessive pronoun.

Vanity Fair was so worried about the growing number of celebrities converting, including Tammy Peterson; wife of Jordan Peterson, comedian Rob Schneider, and the aforementioned JD Vance they published a piece titled, “Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex.”

Sounds ominous.

Throughout the Anglosphere, reports of crowding at Ash Wednesday services dominated social media last week. Cardinal Vincent Nichols recently welcomed the largest number of candidates and catechumens to the Diocese of Westminster’s Rite of Election since 2018.

Earlier in the year, The National Catholic Register reported “a bountiful harvest for the Church this past Easter” with several dioceses reporting increases in the number of conversions anywhere from 30% to 70%.

In many cases this is occurring precisely because the Church has not competed as vociferously in the modernization Olympics in which so many Christian denominations have excelled. Mind you, many priests, bishops, cardinals, and yes, even popes have spewed reams of modernistic drivel in the hopes of aligning the Church with the opinion pages of dying periodicals but the Church’s official teachings have remained stubbornly true to its founding. Decades, centuries and millennia of trends, philosophies, and ideas dominate the world and disappear in a Heraclitean flash yet the Church remains constant. Cities, countries, and empires rise and fall yet the Church endures. This steadfastness in the maelstrom attracts the eye and imagination. Its stillness in the storm is a beacon.

After having witnessed nothing but revolution for their entire lives, many are starved for something that neither conforms, fails, or falls.

They question why they are seeing what they’re seeing around them – rising porn addiction, climbing abortion rates, the advent of trans humanism, surrogacy, skyrocketing childlessness, dwindling marriage rates, and transgender mania.

Some ask themselves how we got here.

Just one hundred years ago, the protestant world marched in near lockstep with the Catholic Church on the issues of marriage, contraception, abortion, and gender. In 1930, however, the Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade meeting of Anglican bishops, voted 193 to 67 with 47 abstentions, to publicly support the use of artificial contraception.

They wrote:
“Where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles.”

Pope Pius XI, in response, warned in his encyclical Casti Connubii that “… any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.”

The UK Times predicted that Lambeth would change the “social and moral life” of humanity. They were, unfortunately, prescient. Within decades we had blue haired genderless Episcopalian priestesses in pantsuits declaring abortion a sacrament.

The Catholic Church’s teachings on these issues were largely ignored, if not ridiculed. It would, however, become increasingly plain that severing the unitive and procreative aspects of sex was a Pandora’s box moment, a seismic shuffling of tectonic plates under our feet.

The Catholic Church, despite every lever of societal pressure that could be employed against it, remained steadfast and solitary. Pope Paul VI warned in Humanae Vitae that the widespread use of contraception would “lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.”

Check.

He also warned that it would lead to men losing respect for women and considering them as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment.

Check. Check.

Pope Paul also warned that this mindset would lead people to believe they themselves held absolute dominion of their own body.

Hat trick!

The Church, through its wisdom, understood these issues don’t exist in a vacuum. Wounds splinter though the world like broken glass. We’d soon discover you can only remove so many pieces from a Jenga board before it all crashes down.

Between 1960, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive and 2020, the birth rate halved. In 1960, the average woman gave birth to 3.65 children. In 2022, that number dropped to 1.66, well below replacement level.

The birth control pill made the sexual revolution possible by allowing the expectation of sex without consequences. In 1960, men’s median age for their first marriage was about 22.8 while women married at a median age of 20.3 However, 55 years later, these ages have increased to 29.2 and 27.1 respectively.

Pregnancies came to be viewed as an inconvenience or problem to be handled. Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the U.S., about 65 million abortions have been performed.

On the other hand, many women looking to get pregnant after twenty years of consistent hormonal birth control experienced difficulty. No worries! Science had an answer! In 1985, the first IVF baby was born. Today, IVF accounts for millions of births worldwide. Some people point to the “good fruit” of babies being born while ignoring the possibly millions of frozen embryos existing in freezers in perpetuity as well as the number of implanted embryos aborted in “selective reduction.”

Difficulties in becoming pregnant also led to increases in surrogacy, which often means young poor women are paid by the wealthy to carry their child. Pregnancy itself is delegated for the right price in a transactional relationship.

With babies already being conceived in test tubes, it is only a matter of time until genetic editing on embryos takes place. In the beginning it’ll be merely to ensure the health and well being of the child but while we’re there we might as well ensure blond hair, blue eyes, an athletic build, and wicked smarts, right? Soon, every parent will have to ask themselves why they would demand their child be brought into the world naturally when they’ll be forced to compete against all these beautiful, brilliant, and athletic genetically edited peers?

With men remaining single for longer periods, pornography rose. Some studies indicate that millions of men may be addicted to pornography. That addiction certainly plays a role in declining marriage rates.

Is it any wonder amid all this confusion, men and women no longer being husbands, wives, mothers, and fathers we are even questioning gender. Barely any self respecting holder of a Ph.D can even answer the question, “What is a woman?”

The media, the academy, and our scientific establishment have abandoned truth. Many Christian denominations are willing to warn about what’s ahead but are reluctant to look back and see exactly where we left the road. In these darkening times when every earthly institution has failed us, the Catholic Church stands alone. No other institution has been absolutely prophetic in its warnings and correct in its teachings.

Many, who’ve long marinated in the mindless anarchy of post-modernism, are now questioning the culturally accepted relativism promulgated by our elites.

And so they come in search of the solid ground that comes with adherence to a moral order that transcends time and place. They come precisely because the Church does not look like the world.

They come because the Church is the Rock to which they can cling when all else becomes formless. The Church, dismissed for decades as old fashioned or irrelevant, offers something more, something eternal.

And so they come. The intellectuals, the skeptics, and the searchers enter the narthex almost in spite of themselves. The lost, who dabbled in New Age, magick, or Wicca find themselves in the pews on Sunday morning grappling with the Real Presence in the tabernacle. Young parents, questioning what world they want their child to live in, teach their children Latin so they can better understand the ancient Mass that formed the majority of saints.

Some are just now sensing sacredness in the world and reaching out while others are exhausted from fleeing the hound of Heaven. They all know somehow that this is not merely the latest trend or the newest movement but an unwarranted and undeserved grace. They feel they’ve been led to something unmovable – Truth. Not truth with the caveat of a pronoun but the eternal truth of the Church founded by Christ.

They engage the faith differently than previous generations, through podcasts, online forums, and social media. They sift through the oceans of primary sources available on the internet. Aquinas, Augustine, and Saint Therese. They pray along with celebrities on apps. They’ve researched the science behind the Shroud of Turin.

For them, the question is not whether the Church fits in with the modern world. They seek otherness. So many Christian denominations work zealously to prove that they are just like the world and sadly succeed. They criticize the Catholic Church for being behind the times but merely highlight the Church’s timelessness.

It is precisely this, the ancient traditions dating back 2,000 years, the keys of Peter, and the real presence of Christ which draws them now. In a strange way, it is the ancient and unchanging that is revolutionary today.