https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/trends/2026/04/02/catholicism-gen-z/

Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men

Young men in their 20s and 30s are increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church as they seek truth, beauty and, yes, girlfriends.

Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT
By Shane O’Neill

NEW YORK — About 100 young adults dressed in business casual were packed into a pizza shop.

“Come to church with us!” they shouted in unison. “In New York City!” added Anthony Gross. He flashed a wide, white grin and raised the roof.

Gross had helped organize this meetup at the Pizza Box in Greenwich Village. Soon, he would lead these Catholic and Catholic-curious young people to a Mass at St. Joseph’s Church a few blocks away.

After Gross moved to New York last summer, he started documenting his search for “The best Catholic church in NYC.”

His criteria included the beauty of the church, a community of young people and “no whack political stuff.” He declined to elaborate what constituted “whack political stuff.”

“I’m not a political influencer at all,” he said. “And I wouldn’t even say I’m a Catholic influencer. Catholicism and my faith is just one part of my personal brand.”

Gross, 22, makes his living as a content creator. He has 125,000 followers on Instagram, 48,000 on TikTok and frequently appears shirtless and flexing, wearing shorts that could be mistaken for boxers. “Those are gym shorts!” he protested with a laugh when asked about them.

Alongside secular content about his daily routines and favorite books are videos such as “My Sunday night as ambitious Catholic living in NYC,” “My Ash Wednesday as Catholic man traveling for work” and “Everything I consumed while fasting for Lent (stimulantmaxxing).”

“The pendulum is swinging,” he wrote in the caption of one video. “Gen Z is turning back to God.”
Soon after he started posting about his search for a church, a young woman slid into his DMs on LinkedIn and told him to check out St. Joseph’s Sunday evening Mass. Shortly after his first visit, he abandoned his search for a spiritual home in New York. He had found it.

The 6 p.m. Sunday Mass at St. Joseph’s — or “St. Joe’s,” as its habitués call it — has become a hub for New York City’s young Catholics, its pews full of young women wearing sweater sets and silver cross necklaces and young men with biceps straining against the sleeves of their polo shirts.

“A huge selling point is finding a potential partner,” said Gross, though he was “rolling solo.”

“The joke is that St. Joe’s is the ultimate place to date Catholic in New York because it’s all the young, beautiful people that go there,” said Thomas L., 24, a parishioner who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name and last initial because his work involves sensitive government contracts.

If you want a seat, you’d better get there early. By 5:45 p.m., all 850 seats were occupied. People too late to get standing spots craned their necks from the steps outside.

The Rev. Boniface Endorf, the pastor at St. Joe’s, estimated that attendance had increased by 20 percent in the past six months. From 2021 through 2024, the number of people receiving their first sacraments at Easter — baptism, First Communion or confirmation — remained steady, between 13 and 16 annually. In 2025, 35 people received sacraments. This year, the church is expecting 88.

A year and a half ago, if 60 people stayed for the church’s wine social after a Sunday evening service, it was a good night. These days, they average about 200 people.
So why are young people flocking to St. Joe’s?

“Our culture pushes that the meaning of life is consumerism and career,” Father Endorf said. “And they’re looking for something more than what they can produce and what they can buy.”

Attendees offered a variety of other explanations: Church was a much-needed IRL “third space” for the terminally online; it afforded meaningful connection and the potential to turn those connections into serious relationships; in an ugly and inauthentic world, Catholicism offered beauty and tradition. A few people credited conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death as a catalyst. (Kirk was not Catholic, but some associates of his have said that he was exploring Catholicism before he was killed.)

Father Endorf acknowledged that attendance spiked the weekend after Kirk was fatally shot, but said there hasn’t been sustained interest in or discussion about Kirk among his parishioners since. “The people that we get aren’t all in the Charlie Kirk mold,” he said. “It’s much wider than that.”

It has been a logistical challenge to manage the crowds — adding chairs, training ushers to cram people in — and a spiritual challenge of meeting the moment.

“You have to assume that they’re fresh and know nothing,” Father Endorf said.
Not that he’s complaining. “Oh, it’s so fun,” he said.

Parishes in Catholic strongholds like New York, Washington and Chicago have all anecdotally reported renewed interest from young people, particularly young men.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Dwight Longenecker, the pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Greenville, South Carolina, said that his parish has attracted “a startling number of young men” who were growing disillusioned with the experience of worshiping in the “big box” churches of the Bible Belt.

“I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said.

His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”

“In other words, they want it to look and sound Catholic,” he added.

A phenomenon, not a revival

Other Catholic cultural touchpoints have recently accumulated: an Oscar for the movie “Conclave,” a pope from Chicago, Rosalía as a nun, nuns as podcasters, monks as memelords and JD Vance’s forthcoming Catholic memoir.

“I absolutely think it’s a phenomenon,” said Professor David Gibson, the director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. But he cautioned against mistaking an uptick in conversions for a full-blown revival.

Gibson cited a 2025 study by the Pew Research Center that found that for every young person coming into the Catholic Church, around 12 young people left.

That doesn’t mean that the new members aren’t having an effect. “If you have this smaller cohort of theo-bros coming in and you have everybody else leaving, that changes the nature on the ground,” he said.

Thomas L. defined the theo-bro as “the extremely online religious man — that usually is a convert — who experiences the faith in either a rules-based or power-based understanding rather than a service- and community-based understanding.”

That’s basically how Clavicular — a 20-year-old internet personality obsessed with physical beauty and blasé about racial slurs — described Catholicism to the influencer Alex Eubank between weightlifting sets during a live stream: “Why I became Catholic in the first place is I really liked the order it followed, right? It’s having some sort of authority that I believe to be one that’s virtuous, kind of keeping people in line.”

Thomas L. thinks attitudes like this miss the point. “From the beginning, the [Catholic] church has been hospitals, it has been outreach, it has cared about the people that no one would touch, the lepers of society, right?” he said.

“I’m afraid that that’s something that maybe some of the Catholic gym bros might be missing,” he added.

Online self-improvement culture does share remarkable parallels with the Catholic concept of mortification of the flesh.

Fitness challenges like Whole30 and 75 Hard dovetail with the Catholic value of harmony between body and soul. The “NoFap” Reddit community and the “No Nut November” challenge are secular forms of chastity. “Sober October” and “Dry January” are pretty similar to giving up a vice for Lent.

Several apps and tech companies have popped up that offer digital aides to Catholic practices. The Exodus90 app offers daily challenges for three months that can include prayer, cold showers and almsgiving. There’s the D180 app, which offers a 180-day program to discern whether you’re called to enter the priesthood. Maybe you’ve seen an ad for the Catholic prayer app Hallow featuring actor Chris Pratt or singer Gwen Stefani.

Collin Bass, 24, completed the Exodus90 and D180 discernment programs. He ultimately decided not to enter the priesthood, but now has a robust Instagram presence under the handle catholiclayman.

“One side of me is worried,” he said from his home in Houston. “The church shouldn’t be a social media trendy thing, but it is becoming one.”

But he’s mostly encouraged. “It’s a window into the heart of so many souls of our generation. People are eager to dive into something bigger than themselves,” he said.

The Rev. Mike Schmitz, the creator and host of the “Bible in a Year” podcast, has worked as the chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota at Duluth for more than 20 years. It has always had a strong community of Catholic men, but he has found that certain figures in the “manosphere” were attracting men to the faith.

“I noticed there were some people who were showing up with no experience of religion and no experience of Christianity, but they had exposure to people who are — for lack of a better term — ‘faith-adjacent,’” he said. Father Schmitz specifically mentioned Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who recently started talking about the benefits of prayer on his health podcast.

“These faith-adjacent people have not necessarily led people through the door, but they’ve pointed out, ‘Hey, that door that’s open over there? That is not unreasonable,’” Father Schmitz said.

‘A war on truth’

On a Thursday night in late March, in the penthouse of an office building in Manhattan’s Midtown South, 75 Catholics convened for a monthly Fides Entrepreneurship dinner. The dress code was strictly business formal.

Fides Entrepreneurship was founded by Luca Zocche, a 25-year-old parishioner at the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral in the Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan. He organizes the monthly dinners as a space to learn about how Catholicism and business intersect.

Gross showed up with a young woman named Kathryn Kurt, a digital content creator who had made 252 TikToks detailing different ways to style a scarf. “This is the girl who slid into my DMs on LinkedIn telling me to go to St. Joe’s!” Gross said excitedly.

Other guests included a young woman organizing a “Holy Girl Walk” — modeled after the TikTok “Hot Girl Walk” trend — at which women would pray the rosary while walking in Central Park; a pair of enthusiastic young men who founded an organization called “Civitas Dei” whose mission is “to usher in the Kingdom of God on Earth through the establishment of Catholic civilization”; a co-founder and chief executive of a start-up called Verso Jobs who later said, “It’s insane how common becoming Catholic or being Catholic is in the founder/tech world.”

Each attendee was gifted a prayer card, a book of testimonies from the charismatic Catholic priest Saint Pio of Pietrelcina and free membership to Truthly, a new Catholic AI app.

The guest of honor was Tim Busch, a hospitality and grocery magnate who donated $10 million to the Catholic University in Washington and co-founded the Napa Institute, a conservative networking and leadership organization. He gave a wide-ranging speech that covered his boyhood paper route in Michigan, the importance of finding common ground across political differences, the perils of “wokeism” and the exciting implications of what he sees as an unprecedented worldwide Catholic revival.

Afterward, Andrew Lohse, 36, who wrote the 2014 memoir “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy” and founded the public relations company Overton & Associates in 2021, was doling out generous pours of Armagnac made by the Catholic businessman Raj Peter Bhakta, one of Overton’s clients.

Bhakta had recently announced plans to give away the Green Mountain College campus in Vermont that he had purchased for $4.5 million to a Christian whose vision is “aligned with the revival of the United States and Western Civilization.”

Lohse was confirmed in the Catholic Church on Easter in 2023. He credits conversations with Bhakta with his conversion. Before that, he had dabbled in Buddhist and Hindu teachings and at one point converted to Episcopalianism, which he described as “the Diet Coke of Catholicism.”

During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, he said, he remembers feeling particularly disillusioned. “Society is maybe going through that at scale where we’re like, ‘Well, wait a minute: The economy doesn’t work for almost everyone. The money is worth less. There’s a war on beauty, we don’t make beautiful things, we don’t make beautiful buildings, it’s black cubes everywhere, what’s that all about? There’s a war on truth, a war on human life in every form.”

Lohse thinks young Americans are at a cultural crossroads. “Gen Z men face a time of choosing,” he said. “It’s either porn, drugs, gambling and debt or truth, beauty, discipline and meeting a pretty girl at Mass.”