A Letter to New Catholics Entering the Church Tonight

Thousands will be baptized, confirmed, and received into the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil Masses tonight. This is what I wish someone had told me when I was the only person under sixty in the pew.

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Dear friends,

Tonight, across the country, thousands of men and women will walk into Catholic churches, step into baptismal waters, receive the oil of chrism on their foreheads, and take the Eucharist for the first time. If you are one of them, this letter is for you.

I’ll attempt to speak not only for myself, but for every Catholic who has walked in the the faith of the apostles — people who stayed when staying was hard, who came back after years away because something kept pulling them through the door, who never stopped believing that the Church of Jesus Christ, for all its wounds, remains the most extraordinary community of faith the world has ever known.

I grew up in a Church that was deeply bruised, broken, and scarred by the sex abuse scandal. There were so many Masses where I was the only person under the age of sixty in the church.

The pews were half-empty. The homilies felt tired. The parking lots cleared out faster than they filled up. There were moments — more than I care to admit — when I felt like I was the last guest at a party whose time had long ended.

God has a habit of surprising us.

You have probably seen the headlines. The Washington Post reported this week that young men and women are flocking to Catholic parishes in numbers that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. The New York Times wrote about the surge of new converts entering the Church this Easter.

More than 80% of American dioceses are reporting increases in the number of adults entering the faith — an average jump of 38% over last year.

The Archdiocese of Newark alone expects to welcome 1,701 new Catholics tonight. Detroit will receive 1,428 — the most in twenty-one years. Los Angeles anticipates more than 8,500.

A lot of ink has been spilled over whether the Catholic Church is having a “moment,” whether we are the hottest club in the country, whether celebrity conversions and TikTok catechesis are fueling some kind of revival. I think much of this commentary misses the point entirely.

And to my fellow cradle Catholics and lifelong parishioners — I know that some of us carry a quiet skepticism toward all these new arrivals. We wonder if they will stay.

We wonder if they understand what they are signing up for. I get it. As St. Paul VI reminded us time and again, the Church is evangelical at its core. It exists to grow its ranks.

It exists to bring every human soul into communion with the living God. That is the entire project. If we treat new members as tourists rather than family, we have forgotten what this house is for.

The Catholic Church has never been a club.

As Archbishop Ronald Hicks said at his installation Mass in New York this February: “This is a call to be a missionary Church, not a country club. A club exists to serve its members. The Church, on the other hand, exists to go out and serve all people, on fire with faith, hope, and charity in the name of Jesus Christ.”

And the doors of this missionary Church have always swung widest for the people the world overlooks. Dorothy Day — one of the great American Catholics of the twentieth century — converted to Catholicism and spent the rest of her life serving the poorest of the poor on the streets of New York.

Her Episcopalian mother once complained that Dorothy had left respectable society to go to Mass with “the help.” Day did not flinch. She knew what the Church was for.

Pope Francis put it as directly as anyone ever has: the Church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners. That is the truth of it, and if you are walking through those doors tonight, you should know it from the start. You are entering a community of broken people who keep showing up because they believe — against all evidence and every failure — that the mercy of God is real and that it changes lives.

Look at who we are. We are 1.4 billion people on every continent, speaking every language, spanning every race, every culture, every class.

For two thousand years, Catholics have founded hospitals, built universities, fed the hungry, sheltered refugees, educated children in the poorest corners of the world, created some of the most beautiful art and music in human civilization, and fought for justice in places where justice had no other advocates.

We have also failed catastrophically — harboring predators, protecting power at the expense of the vulnerable, staying silent when the Gospel demanded that we speak. Both of these things are true about the Church, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The Church is not worth entering tonight because of its track record of perfection. I have stayed — through every scandal, every empty pew, every crisis of faith — because of something I encountered on a Sunday morning in March 2013.

It was March 17 — the first Sunday of Pope Francis’s pontificate. The gospel that day was the story of the woman caught in adultery, dragged before Jesus by men who wanted her stoned.

Francis stood in the window above St. Peter’s Square and reflected on that story in his first Angelus address. He told the crowd about an elderly woman in Buenos Aires who had once told him: “If the Lord did not forgive everything, the world would not exist.”

Then he said the words that changed the trajectory of my life: “God never tires of forgiving us. It is we who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.”

I have carried that sentence with me for thirteen years. It has sustained me through every doubt, every failure, every day I fell short of the life the Gospel demands.

Thomas Merton described God’s nature as “mercy within mercy within mercy.” That has been my experience of faith — not as a ladder I climb toward perfection, but as a mercy I keep falling back into.

So here is the one piece of advice I would offer my fellow Catholics entering the faith tonight: your growth as a follower of Jesus will not ultimately depend on the quality of your prayer, the uprightness of your behavior, or the discipline of your spiritual life.

Those things matter. But the foundation of everything is your willingness to keep returning to the mercy of God, which surpasses all understanding.

God is pure mercy. When you fail — and you will — embrace God’s boundless mercy. It outlasts our sins and runs faster than we can hide.

When you’re struggling, look to the example of Pope Leo XIV.

God placed him on the seat of Peter at this particular moment in history for a particular reason. He is our supreme shepherd — a man of extraordinary moral clarity, pastoral tenderness, and prophetic courage. Learn from his words and his example, and let him teach you what it means to follow Jesus in a world that desperately needs the Gospel lived out loud.

Because the Church of Jesus Christ does not stop at the doors of the parish. It follows you into every corner of your life — your work, your relationships, your finances, and yes, your politics. Everything is God’s domain.

The faith you receive tonight asks something of you in every single moment. It asks you to defend the dignity of all life and to welcome the immigrant, to feed the hungry and to visit the prisoner, to fight for a living wage and to care for creation — and to see the image of God in the people your political party would rather you ignore.

God challenges my politics — and yours. No one is exempt.

Catholic social teaching does not fit neatly into any partisan box, and that is one of its great gifts — it will make you uncomfortable no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, because the Gospel always demands more than any platform can deliver.

The road through this life can be narrow and difficult. But you do not walk it alone. You have a community of the living and the dead, of sinners and saints, walking with you the whole way — Augustine and Aquinas, Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero, your grandmother who prayed for you every night, and the stranger in the pew beside you tonight who is just as scared and just as hopeful as you are.

Welcome home. You always have a place in this house. Because of God’s gift of the crucified and risen Jesus, you will always be our sisters and brothers.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with every Catholic — cradle and convert, doubter and believer — who has looked at this bruised, beautiful Church and decided to stay.

We stand with the families entering the faith tonight and with the communities that will welcome them.

In a culture that treats religion as a lifestyle brand, we remain rooted in a faith that calls us to something harder and more beautiful than any trend: the daily, unglamorous, world-changing work of following the crucified and risen Jesus.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something real — not culture-war content, not celebrity conversions, but the moral seriousness and radical mercy that the Gospel demands.

Tonight, on the holiest night of the Christian year, that hunger has never been more visible.

If you believe this mission matters — Catholics and people of goodwill defending human dignity against the forces that cheapen and exploit it — I am asking you to join us.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.