Each Sunday, a group of Catholics meets in the basement of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village after the 6 p.m. Mass. They mingle over wine and cheese for half an hour, and then Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican friar and priest, usually leads an hour-long discussion—about the nature of freedom, perhaps, or the virtue of hope, or a theologically laden Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The weekly gathering is called In Vino Veritas, Latin for “In wine, there is truth.”
Nearly everyone there is young—from the ages of 21 to 35, according to Father Teller—a contrast with the population of American Catholicism as a whole. (According to the Pew Research Center, nearly three in five U.S. Catholic adults are 50 or older.) And weekly attendance is growing. After the coronavirus pandemic, Father Teller told me, it hovered in the single digits; by 2025, it averaged a bit more than 100 attendees. So far this year, approximately 150 people, most of them young professionals in finance, tech, and the arts, spend a given Sunday evening in the Greenwich Village basement.
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