Posted on 11/28/2025 7:24:25 AM PST by Cronos
You have probably heard that something extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church in France. The French bishops’ conference announced in April that more than 10,000 adults were due to be baptised in 2025 – a 45 per cent increase on the year before.
It’s not just adult baptisms that are booming. A record 19,000 people, many young, attended this year’s Paris to Chartres pilgrimage. An unprecedented 13,500 high school students took part in the 2025 Lourdes FRAT pilgrimage, a major annual youth event.
The country is also seeing what French media call a 'boom biblique': a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. Religious bookstores report a 20 per cent increase in purchases since 2024.
It's easy to state these facts. But it's harder to discern their cause. Why are young people flocking to the Catholic Church more than 200 years after it was violently ejected from the public square during the French Revolution?
News reports - both in France and English-speaking world - have only scratched the surface of the phenomenon. But the most in-depth investigation to date has just been published in France. It's called Enquete sur ces jeunes qui veulent devenir chretiens (Inquiry into Why young people want to become Christians) and the author is Anthony Pasquier, a journalist at the French Catholic weekly Famille
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.co.uk ...
I was in Strasbourg recently and visited its famous Notre Dame Cathedral.
It’s a very crowded tourist area, thousands of people were around
It was early evening (so the Church was closed) but outside the main door, on their knees, were about 10 young people, praying the rosary. Their sign simply said for God to save and preserve France.
What an inspiring statement of faith and patriotism.
Driving through the countryside in Dijon some years ago with another family and also a priest friend en route to visit St Bernadette’s convent, we stopped for lunch. Real food and wine. My friend looked around at the beautiful farmland, flower, cattle. She said ‘God really blessed France’
Yep
I remember an earlier article here on the topic. The number of people attending church in France had recently increased. The point of that article was understanding why. They found the largest driver was people were starting to read the Bible and came to the conclusion they needed to explore and find a church. They were then exploring churches. It impacted both Protestant and Catholic churches. The Holy Spirit can’t be stopped.
Maybe the French will discover that it’s good to be French.
The Islamic alternative doesn’t look so good. My guess is that it’ll take a civil war to fix it at this point, and they’d be lucky to come out of it still French.
Yes, Evangelicalism in France continues to grow, driven by conversions And the more Catholics, the greater the mission field for salvation.
Wow!
—€ And the more Catholics, the greater the mission field for salvation.
Truth
Maybe it took an Islamic invasion to get a rotting society to wake up and realize the Church and Christianity are actually core to their culture. You can have one or the other, make your choice - Islam forces you to. Atheists have no answer to Islam because they have no understanding.
This is true.
Maybe it took an Islamic invasion to get a rotting society to wake up and realize the Church and Christianity are actually core to their culture.
Barbarians at the gate are noisy, but it's worse than that. Christianity has been badly served by its priesthood. The Hebrew Bible doesn't say what people think it does, even Jews don't have a clue. What needs to happen is what I term, Hebrew originalism, in search of the pastoral origins of the Torah, which Christ fully understood once one understands the centrality of the Sabbath for the Land in His thesis. Effectively, the entire Judeo-Christian world needs a rethink, going all the way back to Genesis 1. I can hear the heels digging in now and yes, I've been working on publishing that for fifteen years but I do have too much on my plate. I can say that the Torah IS scientifically accurate, especially as regards the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but only once it is understood as clearly intended once one breaks out of that habituated religious perspective that has made a total mess of that original intent. It's time we all grew up before that manic claque of idiot zealot perverts runs us over.
Atheists have no answer to Islam because they have no understanding.
“Why are young people flocking to the Catholic Church more than 200 years after it was violently ejected from the public square during the French Revolution?”
This is a somewhat ahistorical statement, as it implies that that French Catholicism has been down and out since 1789. Reality is more complicated, as the French Church has had its ups and downs over the last 240 years. There were, for example, strong Catholic revivals in the 1830s (e.g., with the founding of the Congregation of Holy Cross that started U. of Notre Dame) and again in the 1870s when after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War there was a feeling that they’d lost the war due to moral decline in the country.
“good times create weak men”...etc.
I believe the Church has been feminized. It doesn’t breed the kind of men that are required to hold back real evil. Jesus Christ wasn’t some hippie pussy. Quite the opposite.
It’s going to take more than just “returning to the Church”, as many of these “Churches” are now LGBTQIA+++ trying to pander to wokeness to keep the lights on - losing all their true meaning in the process. Many of them run by women. Real men, looking for real meaning, don’t find what they’re looking for when they find such places.
Nothing about Mary?
Yes, we can turn people away from the heresy of the sons and Luther and back to the one true faith.
—> Yes, we can turn people away from the heresy of the sons and Luther and back to the one true faith.
Anyone who comes to saving faith in Christ alone is not likely to turn back to the Roman Hamster Wheel™️ of guilt and useless works.
Luther was used by God to recover the gospel of grace and the scriptures, but I only know one “Lutheran”
- nor many believers who would know anything about him.
I can tell you he was at least one Roman priest who was not gay - and helped many nuns and fellow priests fulfill God’s plan for marriage.
I also observe he lives in your head rent-free.
Islam has one goal; control the infidel or kill him.
Allow me to put it another way: Islam has one goal; unaccountable and uncontested power the left is more than happy to use.
They "think." As atheists, they don't know what they're up against.
Mary lives rent free in a Protestant head.
Going to be interesting when you meet Jesus and he says “ now what did you say about MY mother?!”
And we PROTs will say, “Nothing, but have you heard what YOUR church has done to her?”
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