By Frederick Woodward

Catholicism is making a comeback. From France to Texas, metrics pour in from all across the West, pointing to a generational shift taking place. But what’s at the heart of this phenomenon? What implications does it have for the future of Western civilization? And why should defenders of a Christian social order, even non-Catholics, care?

Recent statistics paint a dramatic and diverse portrait of Catholicism’s growing spread. In 2025, France reported a 45% increase in conversions since the same date a year before. This year, the number increased a further 83% over last year’s total. This is the greatest amount recorded since these numbers began to be tracked over two decades ago, and young adults (18-40) constitute a remarkable 82% of new Catholics. Closer to home, the Diocese of Fort Worth in Texas reported a 72% increase in converts to Catholicism from 2023 to 2024. Perhaps most conspicuously, across England and Wales, a striking 41% of churchgoers aged 18 to 35 identify as Catholic. This number, which is more than the two largest Protestant affiliations combined — Anglicanism at 20% and Pentecostalism at 18% — is remarkable. Together, all these numbers speak to a theme resounding throughout the West. 

Young Western citizens — our very own generation — are fascinated with what our ancestors revered. The testament is present even in the symbols that unify the reactionary movements in ascendance across the West. Artifacts speak to this, like the traditional St. George’s cross in England — a prominent feature in reactionary protests across the UK  and the popular iconography of the medieval Crusaders. To paraphrase Dom Prosper Guéranger’s Liturgical Year, “The nations of the West bear upon them the marks of the Church even when they know it not.” We are simultaneously mystified and obsessed with these, our noble symbols and practices of old. They form a heritage and a birthright which is ours to claim, even as our direct generational connection to them lies severed by the hands of our predecessors, the careless moderns. Of all the institutions which embody this heritage, one shines forth in particular as a beacon of light and direction which illuminates all the rest: the papacy. 

As an institution, the papacy is by its very composition grounded in and representative of these  traditional cultural forms, an observation only strengthened by its spiritual telos. The papacy ought to be the most out-moded, if not derided, institution in modern culture, while the most revered in a properly ordered one. And yet, at the climax of the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, the concurrent livestream viewers reached 5.87 million, far surpassing similar secular events like the 2024 Paris Olympics, which reached a peak livestream viewership of only 3.87 million by comparison. Livestreaming as a metric of viewership is arguably the best way to gauge interest among younger viewers. A 2024 Broadpeak study found that livestreaming is quickly becoming the default mode of engagement for younger generations, making the ratio between devotees of God and man’s respective ingatherings particularly telling.

The account given by these metrics is crucially important in interpreting the resurgence of practiced faith and reverence for our Western patrimony. In 1920, the poet Hillaire Belloc vividly analogized the office of the Holy Pope of Rome to the illuminating flame of our shared Western Heritage. “The Catholic Church,” he wrote in Europe and the Faith, “is the continuation of the Roman Empire. The Papacy is the candle by which the lantern of Christendom is lit.” The resurgence of interest in and filial adherence to the papacy should bring joy to the heart of even the most weary defender of Western virtue and vision. 

For, with a renewed devotion to the papacy, there can finally be reason to hope that the storm clouds of moral confusion, the church’s plague for decades, will fade amid a reasserted confidence in a visible authority whose vesture and action points not to man but God. Right relation to the eternal orders and vivifies man’s relation to the natural and temporal. For centuries, the papacy mediated international disputes with a moral clarity and fairness that individual nations, even those appointed ‘independent arbiters,’ found impossible to imitate. That role is again emerging with Pope Leo’s stated goal of arranging a “just and lasting” peace between Russia and Ukraine. And it is Catholicism that is uniquely positioned to accomplish this. As the noted public intellectual and Catholic convert T. S. Gregory wrote in his magnum opus The Unfinished Universe nearly a century ago, 

For, with a renewed devotion to the papacy, there can finally be reason to hope that the storm clouds of moral confusion, the church’s plague for decades, will fade amid a reasserted confidence in a visible authority whose vesture and action points not to man but God.

Nowadays, [all manner of] Christian churches can enunciate theories, proclaim the peace of God, and deplore national animosities. But words are only words. Blood and iron are not subdued, nor is wealth redeemed by a purely spiritual Church…The Gospel of the Crucified cannot be proclaimed by a Christianity that refuses the Cross on the ground that a Cross is an instrument of Caesar.

In complement to geopolitical mediation and moral teaching, the papacy also represents the last and potentially decisive bastion against the dehumanizing forces of techno-authoritarianism that besiege the modern world. As Frederick William Faber wrote amidst the soulless and embittered revolutions of the mid-nineteenth-century, “the Church is the mother of all that is gentle, tender, and humane in the world.” Only true humanism can refute the false conceptions of man’s nature that many technologists propose. And only the viso Catholica mundi, the Catholic vision of the world, reliant upon the papacy, can produce true humanism. 

The future is not certain. Leo XIV may not be St. Peter, but he is his successor. He stands definitively within a lineage of men who, from the first pope onward, have reconciled man to fellow man – against all odds – as warriors, thinkers, but most of all believers.  And as the newest Servus Servorum Dei – the newest Servant of the Servants of God – this quiet man, whose name derives from that of the lion, might just play the most understated and pivotal role possible in restoring the West for a new generation of servorum Dei, for us, God’s servants, whose actions will echo eternally.

Frederick Woodward is a junior studying Political Economy, Journalism, and Finance.