Catholic converts wait and ponder, some longer than others. And, this spring, Americans flocked to the Church, including waves of Generation Z converts.

Among them were Anna and Dylan Pooler, 20 and 21, respectively, who were baptized and confirmed at St. Anne’s in Richmond Hill, Georgia, this Easter. Both grew up attending nondenominational churches in Maine. In 2023, soon after marrying and moving to Georgia, where Dylan is stationed in the Army, they attended a Mass in Savannah. Although not Catholic, Anna had gone to a Catholic high school for its small class sizes. It was Dylan’s first Mass. 

Anna prayed that God would give her new husband the same experience of the Holy Spirit she’d had. And that day, “I felt God’s embrace around my heart,” Dylan said, admitting he’s not usually emotional. Mass was the missing puzzle piece from the non-Catholic churches he’d attended. Both wanted to join the Church.

Then Dylan was deployed to Germany, and Anna moved back to Maine. God gave them a pause, Dylan said, ensuring they were ready. When they returned to Georgia, they enrolled in Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) and found an apartment near their church, where Anna says you can hear the bells calling you. 

Dylan found it difficult to juggle his demanding work schedule with classes. But the more he honored his commitments, the closer he drew to God. Anna wrestled with the Church’s “outlandish” teaching on contraception. After a natural family planning expert explained it, Anna said, “If anything, it turned my heart even more towards the Church.” To quell her anxiety, she placed her problems on the altar during adoration. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” she said, quoting the words that constantly play in her head from her confirmation saint, St. Augustine. 

Confirmation at Holy Family Catholic Church in Port St. Lucie, Florida, completed 27-year-old Will Bagley’s 180-degree turn from the views he’d held a decade earlier. He’d grown up in Amarillo, Texas, surrounded by “Bapticostal churches” that criticized Church teachings. “I felt Catholicism was a counterfeit of Christianity,” he said. “I felt like it was legalization, like modern-day Pharisees, so to speak.”

While preparing to attend a Christian college in Denver, however, his heart warmed. Eager to learn about different faiths, he attended a Mass, merely to check it out. Everything was the opposite of what he expected. “Every time I heard the priest speak, every time I heard the liturgy, I was reminded of something in Scripture,” he told the Register. 

He spent the next decade hungering for truth, ever more drawn to traditional worship and even Gregorian chant. He toyed with investigating the Episcopal church but wondered what would happen if he went all the way to the Catholic Church. By this time, he had moved to Florida and discovered the conversion stories of Scott Hahn and Steve Ray. He signed up for OCIA last year with no intention to necessarily make an Easter commitment. 

But the timing was right. He struggled during Lent, tempted to retreat “back to my comfort zone.” Church teaching on the communion of saints provided comfort. “Knowing that there are, at this moment, saints that are praying for my needs was something that relieved me in knowing that I wasn’t alone in what I was going through,” he explained. 

Earlier this year, he became engaged to a cradle Catholic who is now reconnecting with her Catholic roots. So he chose St. Joseph as his confirmation saint. “I couldn’t think of a better example than the patriarch of the Holy Family to guide me,” he said.

Of course, not everyone entering the Church during Easter hailed from Gen Z. Many were mid-life converts. 

Rachel Di Martino, a 47-year-old IT manager, mother of five and four-time OCIA recidivist, wasn’t sure she’d ever become Catholic. The daughter of hippies who found Christ during the Jesus movement, she grew up in the Congregational church. Although her parents didn’t criticize Catholics, they enrolled her in an anti-Catholic charismatic school. There, she followed her own drummer, devouring G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, becoming a Karen Killilea devotee, and dissecting Flannery O’Connor. In high school, she boarded overnight buses, alone, to the March for Life in Washington, D.C., where she “got to see tiny nuns standing up to big crowds.” 

During a C-section with her second child, she turned down the offer to tie her tubes, for free. “With my third, I got a really hard sell,” she told the Register. “I was lying there, at my most vulnerable, in no way a Catholic. But what Chesterton had written about the Church being around for 2,000 years punched me in the face. I thought, ‘They know something more than my church that’s been around for 100 years.’” She gave the doctors are equally emphatic “No” — and welcomed two more children.

The seeds of Catholicism grew. In 2021, Di Martino started OCIA for the first time. Each Sunday, she’d attend a Protestant church with her family, then dash to the Catholic church for another service and OCIA, a pattern that continued for four years. She’d been married in a Protestant church to her cradle-Catholic, now-Protestant, husband, but he objected to convalidation. Turns out, what she needed was a radical sanation to validate her marriage retroactively. Once that was accomplished, the Church gave the green light.

Meanwhile, her youngest, Anne, 9, wanted to be baptized and started faith-formation classes. During this year’s Easter vigil, mother and daughter were welcomed into St. Therese Catholic Church in Mooresville, North Carolina. On May 17, 2025, the Church will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the canonization of the saint also known as the “Little Flower.”

Cathy Reed-Collins, 52, and a special-education teacher, waited her whole life to convert. Although many Midwest dioceses have reported record numbers of converts, she was confirmed at St. Mary’s Church in Westville, Illinois, in a rapidly shrinking diocese. She’s firmly bucking the trend.

During OCIA, she got considerable pushback from Protestant friends. “It’s really all there in the Old Testament and New Testament,” she told them. “It harkens to a 2,000-year-old Church that still exists.”

Calling herself a “Christian mutt,” Reed-Collins grew up in South Illinois with general Baptist roots, attended Methodist Vacation Bible School, married a Mennonite farmer (she’s divorced), and circled back to nondenominational churches. Yet, her whole life, she’d been drawn to Catholicism and, in high school, bought a book and wrote a 10-page paper on the Church, laughing at herself now to think she could distill the faith in 10 pages.

“I didn’t know what the Eucharist was until I read that book,” she told the Register. Or how to pronounce it. Then she thought, “No, no, they really don’t think that, do they?” The more she read, the more she realized human knowledge could only take her so far. “I’d never really coined anything in my religious upbringing as mysterious. It was always sola scriptura [‘by scripture alone’],” she said.

Decades passed. She grew increasingly disillusioned with a “stage show” form of worship. One day, God laid these words on her heart: “You don’t have any obstacles. You’ve got every opportunity to go where I’m leading you. Why are you not doing it?”

So Reed-Collins took the plunge. By then, she’d attended Mass several times and confided “that was the hill I would die on.” But she faced another hurdle: the Church’s teachings about Mary. She read Scripture, prayed and thought about her own son. Over time, God softened her heart, and now she’s thinking about consecrating herself to Mary, the “nerdy” teacher in her excited about a journey she feels is just beginning.

What held her back all those years? She feared a rift with her “proudly Protestant” parents and wasn’t willing to take that risk. But God provided. 

Her parents accompanied her to Easter vigil. “My mom tells me she has been saying prayers for me to find peace for years,” Reed-Collins said. And she never had. Until now.