What’s Behind the Catholic Conversion Surge?

by Robert Mixa

St. Thomas Aquinas begins his Summa Theologica saying man is directed to God. This might be a truism unworthy of special consideration. But to today’s generation, who have been unconsciously shaped by what some have called positivistic atheistic humanism, such a truism needs explanation, even if the truth of such a proposition, at first glance, strikes most people as obviously true. 

About a year or two before my confirmation in the 8th grade, I started to have a sense of the futility of things -that this world ultimately does not satisfy. Most of my hopes, once fulfilled, did not bring me the joy I was anticipating. I became a bit depressed, thinking that none of my desires and hopes would ever deliver. Sharing the sentiments of Hesiod, hope felt like a curse. And yet, accepting that this is just the way it is did not seem right either. Part of my problem was practical: if desire and hope are what move us to act, and both have been shown to disappoint, what reasons remain for doing anything at all? I thought such an approach led to despair. But something told me there must be good reasons for action. 

It was around this time that I discovered Fr. Ronald Rolheiser's book The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. I think my mom must have gotten it at a religious bookstore. She was becoming more devout, and the title must have captured her attention. It captured mine too, for it seemed to offer an answer to my longing. Rolheiser told me that my disappointment was not a malfunction, but rather a sign. According to him, the problem is not desire itself, but instead, it was misdirected desire. The solution was to direct desire to what Kierkegaard (citing Luke 10:42) called "the one necessary thing" - to long the right way This idea was foreign to me, but I realized it was worthy of further study. Eventually, my ideas about spirituality changed, and I saw Rolheiser’s point as the most important thing in life. 

Rolheiser sees eros as the basis of the spiritual life. He writes, "Spirituality concerns what we do with desire...it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros." Citing St. John of the Cross, he says, "...the starting point of the spiritual life and spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros." 

I was reminded of The Holy Longing after reading a March 26, 2026 article in The New York Times "Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts".  Many of the converts cited in the piece mention the holy eros that I experienced. Jacqueline Chavira said, "There was a void in me that I could not fill." Sharon Kalil, raised Jewish and formerly a self-described atheist, said of her decision to enter the church, "It's hard to explain—it just really felt like a calling on my heart." 

Almost every society has understood the human being as ordered to the holy. But in the West today, the default picture we hold of ourselves is that the realm of the spirit, essentially our relation to God, is an add-on. In practice, we have all but forgotten the meaning and order of desire and the spiritual life. When we pick up books like St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel, we see that is not just a 16th century Carmelite's personal musing, but a practical guide drawing on centuries of contemplative tradition with descriptions of the soul's movement toward God that are precise and universal. In a sense, it is very much like an electrician's nationally certified handbook for electrical work that helps him be fully successful in his work. Just as the electricians' manual describes the nature of materials that behave the same way regardless of who is working with them, writings like Ascent of Mount Carmel describe the human soul moving toward God as terrain that is objectively there and illuminated by the light of Christ.

My generation has been educated in nearly every skill except the one Aquinas assumed we would know as the most important: how to be ordered toward God. We have inherited a world that treats the holy as optional and the spiritual life as a purely private matter—accountable to no tradition, answerable to no objective standard. But the hunger is still there, as it always has been. The converts being baptized this Easter know it. I knew it at thirteen, finding Rolheiser's book on the bookshelf.

What we lack is not the longing but the language—the maps, the guides, and the wisdom of guides like St. John of the Cross who have traveled this terrain before us and know what it is to be adoptive sons of the Son. Living guides are still among us, and they can help us seriously take up the practice of the spiritual life. Discovering this objective terrain is one of the most practical things we can do today. The surge in new converts this Easter shows us that the holy longing is still present and many seek a to journey the spiritual terrain.