CANTERBURY, England — Reports of a “quiet revival” within the Catholic Church in Britain have been drawing widespread attention over the past week as parishes up and down the country witness ahead of the Easter celebrations a steady growth in interest and attendance, especially among the young.

“The Extraordinary Resurgence of the Catholic Faith in Britain” read a headline in The Daily Telegraph; “Catholics Outnumber Anglicans Two to One Among Gen Z Churchgoers,” read another in The Times, while the website Anglican Ink asked, “Is England Becoming Catholic Again?”

“There are some beautiful signs of growth and renewal in the life of the Church, not least among people in their 20s and 30s,” Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark told the Register, adding that this has been clearly evident at this year’s Rite of Election. 

At the vigil of the Lord’s Resurrection this Saturday, the London dioceses of Southwark and Westminster will be receiving higher numbers than usual into the Church, with Southwark receiving 450 new candidates and catechumens — a decade high — and Westminster recording 500 new faithful, up by 25% from the previous year.

About half of those being received in Westminster are catechumens, new converts who want to be baptized. “They are looking for clarity and stability,” Archbishop Mark O’Toole of Cardiff told The Telegraph. “They are attracted to the Catholic Church’s strong sense of identity and clarity around the teaching of Jesus.” 

The figures come on the heels of a recent survey by the Bible Society, an interdenominational U.K. charity, showing that among Generation Z churchgoers (citizens born between 1997 and 2012) and younger millennials, Catholics now outnumber Anglicans by two to one in the U.K., with young men specially making up the largest increase. 

The survey, titled “The Quiet Revival,” reported that within a few years, Catholicism is expected to overtake Anglicanism as the country’s largest denomination of worshippers, the first time since the Reformation that has happened. 

The polling results, which noted that Christians are “practicing their religion more intentionally” than their forebears, showed that, in 2018, 41% of those who attended liturgies at least once a month were Anglican, 23% Catholic and 4% Pentecostal. By 2024, the figures were respectively 34%, 31% and 10%. It follows earlier findings in January showing that Generation Z were more spiritual than their parents and half as likely to be atheists. 

Meanwhile, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales published figures in January showing Mass attendance in 2023 had grown from 503,000 in 2022 to 555,000 in 2023 — still well below pre-COVID levels of 702,000 in 2019, but the number is rising significantly. A similar pattern is seen in Scotland.

“After our celebration of the Mass of Ash Wednesday at the cathedral, a young woman came to me and said she had not been to Mass for 10 years, but woke up that morning and knew she had to come,” said Archbishop Wilson. “We have been praying for renewal. We shouldn’t be surprised when the Lord answers.” 

He said an “important part” of this revival is that people are being drawn to Eucharistic adoration, which he would like to see made more available. “It is the work of the Holy Spirit and requires our generous response in welcoming people to share the beauty of our Catholic faith,” he said.

Social-Media Factor

Luke Lenz, 25, from Kent, said a Catholic young-adult group of men and women he belongs to has witnessed “exponential growth,” rising from about five to 30 in just two years. He also attends a Catholic men’s group in the historic town of Rochester, the majority of whom are converts or cradle Catholic “reverts,” some who had never been confirmed. 

“It is definitely an interesting time,” Lenz told the Register. “One big factor has been social media,” he said, adding that he and others have been drawn to the “authenticity” of content creators who show “rock-solid conviction” and “values and principles attached to the faith,” along with a “coherent worldview.”  

“The more I looked at it, the more there was an attraction for me,” said Lenz, who was raised in a mix of Protestant denominations before finding his way to the Catholic Church three years ago. The social-media programs, he said, come across “as amateur but authentic in that way where you know they’re genuine.”

 He said he and others in his men’s group have valued such content as they looked for direction in life following university and sought the stability and “anchor” of the faith in a rapidly changing world. He said the truth and coherence of the Church’s teaching and tradition has been a “massive” help to him and his friends. “There’s something you know that you can inherit from people who’ve come before you, and it’s something that if you conserve and keep safe, you can then pass it on,” he said. 

Others have also noticed a revival taking place. Charles Cole, director of the London Oratory Schola, told the Register that he has observed an increase in the number of faithful going to regular confession, praying the Rosary, and “generally approaching their spiritual lives with increased maturity and seriousness.” 

Cole, whose boys’ choir will be touring the United States in July, believes the lockdowns during COVID have played a role in this resurgence of faith, as well as the negative aspects of social media. 

Today’s “troubling times” are “leading people to thirst for truth, which they are able to find in tradition and orthodoxy,” Cole said. The young are naturally motivated by “their sense of idealism to search for higher spiritual sustenance as an answer to the emptiness and evil they encounter in the world.”

Essex native Mark Lambert, who co-hosts the popular YouTube channel “Catholic Unscripted,” said young people are “waking up to the failures of the secular narrative” and are seeking something “more authentic” — a metaphysical dimension along with tradition that “speaks to that desire for the transcendent.” 

He also believes this process is largely taking place separate from the hierarchy. “It is the internet and Catholic influencers who are driving this,” he said. 

Lambert is confident the trend will continue as people become increasingly “disillusioned with the empty promises of the secular culture,” but it will be important to provide coherence or “we could see the trend stalling,” he said. 

Crying Out for Medicine of the Gospel

Asked what the hierarchy could do to try and encourage the revival, he called on them to “focus on what we know works: a call to repentance, preaching the Gospel, unity in the profession of doctrine, with clarity, because the culture is crying out for the medicine of the Gospel.”

Britain is not unique in this reported early, Western revival of faith: The United States, France and Belgium have also witnessed a spiritual awakening, with Generation Z and millennials leading the resurgence. 

Responding to the revival in Britain, U.S. Catholic commentator Michael Knowles observed that people are reacting against “the tyranny of subjectivism that has come from the exaltation of private judgment and the idolatry of individual autonomy. That’s why this is happening and why it’s happening even in the home of Anglicanism and maybe one of the chief political fonts of Protestantism.” 

“It doesn’t seem to make sense on the surface,” he said, “but this has been brewing for a long, long time.” 

English Catholic philosopher and writer Sebastian Morello, who noted this revival in comments to the Register in February, said young men in particular are wondering how they can “acquire some nobility and purpose in a pornographic and self-obsessed world,” and they are finding, “amid all this misery and wretchedness of late modernity, that Catholic tradition offers something completely different to what the world, the flesh and the devil has to offer.”

“The solutions such young men seek to their challenges and maladies are not provided by the competing ideologies that have characterized our recent history,” Morello told the Register on April 15. “What they seek, they intuit, is provided only by mystical transformation in the Christian mystery that began to transfigure our civilization two millennia ago and lives on to this day. The question now facing the institutional Catholic Church is: Can its hierarchy catch up with what the Holy Spirit is doing?”

And as the Anglican establishment, especially in England, “continues to collapse,” and Islam steadily grows in Britain (from four mosques in 1960 to 2,145 today), Morello believes the country “will likely have to choose between a Catholic future or an Islamic one.” 

“If the English want a future that is at all in continuity with its past,” he said, “it will have to reconcile with the Catholic Church and take up once more its coveted title of Mary’s Dowry and, as St. Edmund Campion put it, ‘the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter.’”