Welcome back to Shams Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I've got a lot of exciting news for you. Not least of which is we're ending the season of Lent and entering the season called Tritome, the shortest season on the church's calendar. Fun fact. It's the three holiest days of the year. It begins with tonight, Holy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord's Supper, and it's going to culminate in the Easter Vigil.

But at the Easter Vigil, a lot of people are going to be entering the Catholic Church this year.

And so I want to continue to ask a question I started to ask last year, namely, do we see the seeds or the early signs of a Catholic revival in America?

Now, when I asked that question last year, we were starting to see some pretty interesting

trends. And as we're going to see, those trends have continued and, in fact, seem to be

even improving. But I also want to be cognizant of the pushback the revival narrative has

gotten, and quite reasonably, There are some people who,

not just because they hate joy, because they respect, you know, facts, want to say, yes,

there are these positive signs, but there are these negative signs as well. There are plenty of

people in the young generation, particularly who are just clearly less religious in the generations before.

So we don't want to paint an overly simplistic narrative.

So I want to identify what are the real sources of good news?

What are the grounds upon which we can say something does seem to be happening?

And then what are the limits on that?

Because we don't want to exaggerate the kind of story.

So the first question to ask is just, well, are Catholic conversions really up? And there are a lot of

indications that the answer to that is yes, including looking at different diocese's record keeping

year to year at the Easter vigil. So this has been making the news, both in Catholic spaces

and in secular spaces, because it's enough of a phenomenon that people are starting to notice.

And this is true in Catholicism specifically. We're seeing evidence of this in the U.S. and in the U.K.

and elsewhere. We also are finding broader trends of just people entering Christianity at what appears to be

higher rates.

...