Will the passing of Pope Francis and the ascent of Pope Leo XIV signify the end of the era of liberal Catholicism? Many committed young Catholics hope so. For them, Francis’s rhetoric of reform is out, and traditional Catholicism is in — what they refer to online as #TradCath.

Early evidence is emerging that droves of young people in America and across the West are finding a home in the Catholic Church and its most conservative tenets. Disinterested in the progressive social attitudes espoused by their older peers and burnt out by the digital world, they are hungry for a sense of purpose and community tied to longstanding religious tradition. While it’s too early to predict whether this trend could swell into a religious revival, a backlash against liberal Catholicism is brewing — and the hope is that Leo XIV will carry it forward. 

“I’ve been teaching for 15 years now, at two different Catholic colleges, and I’ve observed a massive shift toward more traditional practices among Catholic students,” an associate professor, Catherine Pakaluk, at the Catholic University of America, a private Catholic research university in Washington, D.C., tells the Sun. She said she has observed growing interest in Latin liturgies, orthodoxy, and old-fashioned theology, with some of her students having “betrothal” ceremonies before weddings. 

“Something is definitely happening,” she said. “From where I sit, I see it among the young women as much as among the young men.”

At the Catholic Center of Harvard University, interest in Catholicism is growing, Undergraduate Chaplain Nathaniel Sanders tells the Sun. “We had 20 students, both undergrads and grads, that were received into the Church here this Easter. And it tends to be from quite a wide spectrum of students, from all walks of life,” Reverend Sanders says. “Students seem attracted, by grace, to the richness of Catholic tradition and the truth of the sacraments.”

Various dioceses across the country are seeing a surge in conversions to Catholicism. A striking example is the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, where the number of converts rose to 1,544 at Easter 2024 from 896 at Easter 2023, an increase of 72 percent. This year, the Diocese saw a similar increase of 1,442 new converts. A plurality of them are members of Gen Z and were previously religiously unaffiliated, part of a group known as the “nones,” according to the Director of Evangelization and Catechesis at the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth, Jason Whitehead.

“That’s indicative of possibly a new norm,” Mr. Whitehead tells the Sun. “People are looking for truth, they’re looking for meaning, they’re looking for purpose, and they’re beginning to find that in the church.” He notes that “the number of converts who are sticking around after they convert and their level of participation in church activity are trending in the right direction.”

A Roman Catholic YouTuber under the handle “Iron Inquisitor” captures the perspective of many young Catholics who are becoming more traditional: “Our society’s secular, relativistic values kind of make you feel empty,” he says in a video. “Young people are hungry for something real.” Novus Ordo masses — the standard Mass format in the Catholic Church, introduced after the Second Vatican Council in 1969 and celebrated in the local language of the parish rather than Latin — feel inauthentic, the YouTuber says. “They got a Eucharistic Minister wearing a mask, handing out the body of Christ like a Ritz cracker.”

Traditional Latin Mass is much more “real,” he suggests. “We’re tired of the guitars, the liturgical dancing, those cheesy Christian songs, trying to ‘get with the times,’ because all it does is just water everything down. I don’t want my church to be like the rest of the society, and it’s so refreshing when you enter a beautiful Latin Mass that’s like a time capsule 2,000 years ago.”

In the eyes of other traditional Catholics, devotion must be all or nothing. “Liberal Catholicism is just another way of saying Protestantism,” a former protestant who converted to Catholicism, Franco Aurelio, explains on his YouTube channel. “You either submit to the teachings of the Catholic Church, or you protest Her.”

The election on Thursday of American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to Pope Leo XIV is so far drawing a mixed reaction from the Catholic Right. 

Some in the MAGA world have unearthed the new pope’s past social media posts which appeared critical of President Trump’s immigration policies and of Vice President JD Vance. They note that he has espoused some progressive views that tie him to Pope Francis: As a bishop in Peru, he took great care to help Venezuelan migrants. As a cardinal, he urged the world to take action on climate change. 

Yet the new pope’s supporters view him as a balanced middle ground between the former pope’s inclusive worldview and a return to a conservative doctrinal path. On social issues, Leo XIV appears more traditional: “Our data shows he’s a strong Republican, and he’s pro-life,” the leader of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, writes on X. His organization sourced the voting history for Leo XIV and concluded that he is a registered Republican who has voted in Republican primaries.

Other conservatives caution against interpreting Leo XIV’s Catholicism through the left-right paradigm of American politics. As conservative political commentator Michael Knowles, who attends the Traditional Latin Mass, argues on X, “The most liberal Catholic prelate is substantially to the right of most conservative Republicans on most issues.”

These voices are part of an online culture that has instrumentalized many young people toward religious practice. On Catholic TikTok, Catholic influencers, including priests, elucidate concepts such as “papal infallibility.” A social media aesthetic featuring lit candles on a sprawling stone altar and highly stylized Virgin Mary statues further valorizes the Catholic identity. The 2024 box office hit Conclave only fueled a fascination with the Church and the papacy. 

This phenomenon comes amid a broader softening toward Christianity. After many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians appears to be leveling off, hovering around 62 percent in the last five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 36,908 U.S. adults from February.

“We’re more confident that the decline in Christianity is slowing down or completely arrested,” pollster Daniel Cox tells the Sun. He serves as the director of the Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute. “What’s less clear is what the trend will turn into — will it continue to level off? Will it go back up? Will it go down?” 

Gen Z could be a surprising source of faith resilience. On average, each generation in America has been 10 percent less Christian than the previous generation. However, the Pew data shows that young adults born between 2000 and 2006 are about as Christian as those born in the 1990s — and the younger cohort is slightly less likely than the second-youngest cohort to have left Christianity.

The allure of Christianity appears particularly prominent for young men, who today are, for the first time in modern American history, more religious than their female peers, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Surveys find that young women are still seeking spirituality, but not as much from the Catholic Church as their male counterparts. They came of age as the #MeToo movement sparked widespread exposures of abuse in church settings, fueling disinterest in hierarchical religious institutions. Young women also express more progressive views of sexuality, gender, and reproductive rights, and lean politically liberal compared to young men. 

The theory of Mr. Cox is that “people are coming to religion from politics,” rather than religion alone informing their political worldview. “That’s not to say that they’re becoming Catholic because they like Trump, but I think it’s sort of moving in tandem — these institutions are more attractive because they’re consistent with this significant shift in what young men want in society and in their own lives.” It helps that prominent conservatives have recently converted to Catholicism, including Mr. Vance and firebrand media personality Candace Owens. 

According to political scientist Ryan Burge, the cynical view is that people are “using religion as a weapon” to oppose progressive attitudes on gender and sexuality, he tells the Sun. “The other view is they are having an honest-to-God religious conversion, and then their politics are then shaped by that religious conversion.”

People moving away from postmodernism are seeking to “reorient our lives the way that our grandparents and our great-grandparents did a hundred years ago and see if that brings us a sense of happiness and structure and peace,” explains Professor Burge, who wrote a 2021 book on the decline of religiosity among Americans. Traditions endure for a reason, he says: “The Catholic Church has got 2,000 years of history, and people are drawn to that right now.”

Mr. Cox is not as bullish on the idea of a dramatic religious resurgence among Gen Z. 

“The health of religious communities is directly tied to families,” he says, and young people today are placing less of a priority on getting married and having children. Yet he notes that certain communities and denominations requiring a high level of sustained involvement, such as the Church of Latter-day Saints, could attract more people seeking to engage in public service. Mr. Burge theorizes that regions that are typically very irreligious in America, such as New England and the Pacific Northwest, might see an uptick in religiosity after essentially hitting rock bottom. 

The course of Christianity could mimic the “long cycle” theory of international relations, which posits that periods of world peace are followed by periods of war, just as periods of liberalism lead to a cycle of conservatism. The last 60 years have seen a decline in American religiosity. 

“This could be the moment,” Mr. Burge says, “the pendulum starts swinging the other direction.”