p/c University of Notre Dame.
Doubtless by this point you have seen the news of massive amounts of conversions of non-Catholic young adults coming into American Catholic parishes. This news has been covered by both religious outlets as well as secular ones.
Many of these conversions are in unlikely places, like New York City. NCR/EWTN recently reported on a Dominican parish in lower Manhattan serving NYU: “88 people received the sacraments of baptism or confirmation at the Easter vigil this year.” Part of this was due to current events: “Many of those coming into the Church, he said, have told him that conservative Christian influencer Charlie Kirk’s murder had a huge effect on them.”
The conversions are good news. But we need to zoom out a little bit to see what is happening in the big picture. People are going to call me “pessimistic” for the following, but keep in mind the truth is always a reflection of reality. And reality is in some sense an emanation of Divine Providence, regardless of how it makes you feel. Below, I am going to use mainstream statistics, not traditionalist sites, to prove my point.
Although there are conversions to the Catholic Church happening in every diocese across the United States, you can see in the above graph done by the Official Catholic Directory (CARA and the USCCB) that conversions to the Church have mainly been on a steady decline since 2000. This means the news covered in the first paragraph of my article is only an uptick after a sad tanking of numbers over the last 25 years.
Even the Pillar reported on that with the above graph: “The number of adults becoming Catholic has been on the decline in recent decades, as have other signs of active participation in the life of the Church — among them marriages (down 59% from 2000 to 2025), infant baptisms (down 53%), and even funerals (down 26%).”
This means the hype over the new conversions is simply excitement against the backdrop of sinking numbers.
The above graph is from the Official Catholic Directory printed in the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators. As you can see, the Index reports only about 80,000 adult converts around the year 2,000 (much less than what was reported by the Pillar above.)
But regardless of who is correct on that 2000 study on adult conversions, the above graph reveals that in 1955 there were 137,000 adult converts in America to the Catholic Church. In 1960 there were 146,000 adult converts into the Catholic Church.
That is significant for many reasons, including the fact that the population of the United States in 1955 is half of what it was in 2025. And yet our forefathers saw many more conversions to the Catholic Church (both in percentage of US population and gross numbers.)
But the really big elephant in the room that is crushing the happy mouse of a few conversions is the above graph. It reveals that for every adult convert through the front door of a Catholic Church today, 8.5 disgruntled Catholics leave through the back door. The above is from the Pew Study. No honest Catholic would doubt it (as even the Pillar above reported on it.) But very few Catholic influencers right now will discuss why so many Catholics are leaving the Church.
Even NCR/EWTN (the same source quoted above in the first NYC story) has an article from 2025 titled 9 in 10 Cradle Catholics Leaving the Church. NCR/EWTN reports, using a study from the University of Notre Dame: “The data revealed that in 1973, 84% of the participants raised Catholic still identified as Catholic when surveyed as adults, but in 2002 it was 74%. By 2022, it had dropped to 62%.”
So, anyway you slice-and-dice it, we are losing massive numbers of souls in the American Catholic Church following Vatican II. Even places like Africa are only maintaining a linear increase in baptisms (due to birth rates) whereas before 1962 Africa had exponential growth to the Catholic Church as proven here with more statistics.
So what is going on here? Why are there nine departing Catholics for every Protestant who enthusiastically enters the Catholic Church in the USA? My answer now is admittedly more anecdotal than statistical at this point.
Having spoken to many people, I believe that American evangelicals are reading St. Thomas Aquinas and Scriptural apologetics books. I also think they’re seeing the Catholic influencers online post pictures of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM.)
I am 100% behind all those things. I have no problem with any of that.
But then the evangelicals enter an average American parish and they find a liturgy totally different from the TLM they saw on Instagram. They find a totally different dogma preached from the pulpit than the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed they studied as dutiful Protestants. They find a hierarchy riddled with clergy-abuse and one shilling for open-borders.
So, while the initial excitement of reading the Church Fathers leads many good evangelicals into the Catholic Church, well, they find a totally different faith and liturgy than that which was promoted for 19 centuries by Apostolic Catholics. In short, what they experience is different from what they know should be happening.
And cradle Catholics simply hit the “eject” button earlier than the Protestant converts because they have endured the doctrinal confusion and moral hypocrisy from the hierarchy for a much longer time.
Once again, the only way forward is to replace modernist ecumenical theology with our old-tyme Apostolic Catholicism that filled every parish Coast-to-Coast until the 1960s. It really wasn’t that complex to be a traditional Catholic for the last 1900 years. It may have been hard, but not complex.
Yes, sigh, I still believe the new sacraments are valid. But if we actually believe each number above is an immortal soul, not a financial projection for a diocese, then the only responsible way forward is to replace the new sacraments with the old sacraments. This is a matter of souls at this point, not gotcha-debates on validity and arbitrary obedience.
How do you think the Catholic Church made a billion converts before 1962? And why have 50,000,000 Catholics left the Church in North and South America since 1965? Stop celebrating the mouse in the room when there’s an obvious elephant that needs to be tackled for the good of more souls going to heaven or hell forever.