In recent years, commentators have puzzled over the steady trickle of young people converting to Catholicism. The explanations tend to circle familiar ground: a hunger for community, a drift toward traditionalism, a vague dissatisfaction with secular culture. Clever as those analyses can be, they often miss the thing itself. They measure the church by its social utility instead of its sacramental reality. To borrow from Augustine, they ask what use religion might serve, while overlooking the restless heart that finally comes to rest in God.
What strikes me most is how clumsy our categories are for describing what actually compels someone to kneel, profess belief, and reorient the whole of their inner life. Catholicism is not reducible to community or ideology. It is, as Thomas Merton puts it, “life itself, alive at its source.” To convert is not to sign on to a platform; it is to be seized by a reality you did not invent and cannot manage.
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