Dynamic Orthodoxy and the New Catholic Revival

Something weird and wonderful is happening across the globe and is even reaching the grass roots in my own hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. This year, the five Catholic parishes in Greenville (Our Lady of the Rosary, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Mary’s, St. Mary Magdalene, and Prince of Peace) have seen a remarkable 44 percent increase in the number of adults being received into the Church compared to 2025. Something similar is happening across the whole state. The Diocese of Charleston experienced a 27 percent increase in the number of adult converts entering the Church through OCIA.

Having begun at the grass roots, at the local level, let’s look wider afield.

According to data compiled by Hallow, the popular prayer app, from more than 80 percent of dioceses in the United States, there has been an average increase of 38 percent in the numbers of adult converts in 2026 compared with the previous year. This is good news, but it gets even better.

The dioceses which reflect authentic Church teaching in terms of orthodoxy and tradition are seeing increases significantly above the 38 percent average. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, presided over by the dynamically traditional and courageously orthodox Archbishop José Gomez, has seen an astonishing 139 percent increase in converts over the past year, with 8,000 adults received into the Church.

The only diocese to record an even larger increase than the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the Diocese of Duluth, in Minnesota, which experienced 145 percent growth in the number of converts in 2026 compared with 2025. The Bishop of Duluth, Daniel Felton, has been supportive of traditional liturgy at a time when other bishops have been seeking to suppress it. Last year, he initiated ad orientem worship in several parishes across his diocese.     

There is a connection in Duluth, as in so many other parts of the country, between youth and tradition, the younger generations being far more open to liturgical tradition than those who are older. The average age of priests in the Duluth Diocese is 47, much lower than the national average. According to Fr. Jacob Toma, a priest of the diocese who is himself only 28 years old, younger people in general and younger priests in particular are drawn to traditional liturgical worship. He added, in an interview with the National Catholic Register, that the request for ad orientem in Duluth wasn’t a top-down clerical initiative but was a response by local pastors to an emerging desire in the members of their parishes.

The same correlation between tradition and conversion can be seen in other dioceses in which the increase in the number of conversions is considerably higher than the national average. The Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, which is presided over by the indomitable tour de force Bishop James Conley, has seen an increase of 79 percent; the Diocese of Tulsa, under Bishop David Konderla, reported a rise in conversions of 115 percent; the neighboring Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, under Archbishop Paul Coakley, reported a rise of 60 percent.

Having begun at my own local grassroots level in Greenville, South Carolina, and having telescoped out to the whole of the United States, we can go even further by spreading our gaze across the Atlantic to the new life being experienced by the Church in the Old World. This Easter in France, over 21,000 adults and teens were received into the Church, a new record for adult converts. The increase in the number of teenagers is simply startling.

In 2017, only 1,385 teenagers requested baptism. This year, that number skyrocketed to 8,152. Similar good news is to be found across the Channel in the United Kingdom, where a similar upsurge in the number of converts is being recorded.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Bible Society, Catholics now make up 31 percent of all churchgoers in the UK, compared to 23 percent last time a similar survey was carried out, in 2018. This is great news in itself, but it gets better. Among younger churchgoers, aged 18 to 35, the number of Catholics rises to 41 percent, whereas only 20 percent belonged to the Church of England and 18 percent identified as Pentecostal.

To return to the wording with which we began, something weird and wonderful is happening. It is weird in the original Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, weird (wyrd), which denotes the weird and wonderful presence of God in the very fabric of reality, in the very threads of weird-woven everyday life. A less poetic way of saying the same thing is to say that we are seeing the movement of the Holy Spirit.

But why is it that the Holy Spirit seems to be moving mysteriously in a way in which the restoration and renewal of tradition is being woven together with the restoration and renewal of the Church through the dramatic increase in conversions, especially among the young? It is simple when you think about it.

There are only ever two spirits at work in every generation. There is the Spirit of the Age, the zeitgeist, and there is the Holy Spirit, the Heiliger Geist. When those in the Church follow the Spirit of the Age, we will find the absence of the Holy Spirit. This is why the religious orders which abandoned tradition began to wither and die. They had abandoned the Faith of their fathers and were abandoned by the Holy Spirit.

As the great G.K. Chesterton reminds us, we don’t want the Church to move with the world; we want the Church to move the world. The union that we are seeing between tradition and conversion is the movement of the Holy Spirit, which is the only spirit that can move the world and not be moved by it. These are weird and wonderful days indeed!