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Posted on 04/04/2026 11:19:09 PM PDT by Cronos
- The Catholic Diocese of Youngstown is welcoming 282 new converts this Easter, a significant increase from previous years.
- This local growth is part of a global trend,
- Many new converts, particularly young adults, are drawn to the church's offer of objective truth and ancient traditions in a modern world.
"Behind these numbers are people who have heard the Gospel being proclaimed and witnessed it being lived by priests, deacons, lay ministers, the faithful, as well as friends and family," Youngstown diocese Bishop David Bonnar said. "I think it is a powerful affirmation of the work of the Holy Spirit in this portion of the Lord’s vineyard"
"I wasn't super-serious about my faith. But she felt a calling in our junior year to stay with the Catholic church. And I said, I guess I'd better figure out what that means because I knew nothing about the Catholic church."
Hullenbaugh began researching.
"I found that it was posing a lot of questions and giving a lot of answers to things I'd never considered before, like why are we here, and the nature of God," he recalled. "It truly set something on fire in my heart, something I had never experienced up until that point. I just kept reading and reading and reading. I just kept consuming as much as I could. And eventually I knew, this is the real deal, this is truth. This is something that I've been seeking, and I didn't even know I was seeking it."
"what the world has to offer to people, especially to young people, has failed to satisfy the longings of their hearts,"
(Excerpt) Read more at eu.cantonrep.com ...
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A: The Catholic Church has maintained sacred tradition as handed down by the Apostles.
This
Charlie Kirk explains why young Evangelicals are converting to Catholicism
The Charlie Kirk Show (transcript) ^ | April 2025
Posted on 4/26/2025, 4:18:23 PM by CondoleezzaProtege
...The trend that we are seeing is a very positive one. People are seeking tradition...It’s a learning lesson for a lot of pastors I talk to. If you are not creating an environment where the people that come to your church can find holiness and meaning and be elevated, you’re not doing your job.
There was a time in the nineties where people were hungry for a personal encounter with God, and Evangelicalism I think offers that better than some Catholicism circles. Maybe that’s to be debated, but times change and needs an appetites change. And I could tell you on Saturday evening, I wanted to honor Our Lord the night before the Resurrection, so I knew the local Catholic church was doing an Easter vigil. Mind you, this goes from eight pm to midnight. An Easter vigil is a very long standing tradition in the Catholic Church, where they read basically almost the entire Bible.
I go there and I couldn’t find a seat at ten pm at night on a Saturday night, and over half the people there were people my age. It was like a selfie line just trying to get in there...I said, is this a Turning Point rally or is this an Easter vigil?
I’m not Catholic, but I went there because when I walk into that specific Catholic church, it points up. It’s not a Costco with a rock band and a Ted Talk and good coffee. To be honest, I’ve had enough of that. I don’t want to go to Sam’s Club to go to church in a school gym. Kind of enjoyed the holiness, the beauty, the pageantry, the structure, the tradition of the reverence. So I totally get it. God bless those churches for elevating our soul.
What is the general feeling of these new young Catholics about abortion? The current leadership seems very tolerant of the practice.
Possibly a response the being one of the crowd?
To be an individual?
The Hebrew word for “Holy” means
to be separate.
My God is a personal relationship
with him.
I don’t need a person to tell me his
law.
I needed a teacher to teach me how
to read, interpret,and how to reason,
not how to act based on their
interpretation of that text.
I think they are against it. And to be fair, the priesthood, hipsters though some might be, have vocally condemned abortion at every occasion. This in spite of their near complete alignment otherwise with the Rat agenda.
“needed a teacher to teach me how
to read, interpret,and how to reason”
Have you read Aquinas Summa Theologica?
This is a Catholic caucus thread
No. It’s the most visible and accessible form of Christianity.
Not listed, meanwhile all faiths called Christian have been losing members for years, including cults who also are overall losing more than gaining in the US:
, the Catholic Church in the U.S. is losing members more than gaining them, experiencing significant "cradle Catholic" drop-off, with many leaving due to doctrinal disagreements, scandals, and a general rise in religious "nones," though Hispanic Catholic retention is higher than for white Catholics, and overall Christian decline might be stabilizing, reportsimmigration has helped to bolster the number of Catholics in the United States. Overall, Catholics have declined from 24% of U.S. adults in 2007 to 19% in the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS), while the Protestant share of the country’s adult population has dropped from 51% to 40% over the same period. For more on these trends, read the Overview of this report.↩ Pew Research Center.
ince 1995, the rate at which Jehovah's Witnesses were growing started to decline, coinciding with the change of the Generation Doctrine, and internet access to information regarding the religion and its teachings. The most dramatic change has been the number of hours of preaching required to gain a new member. In 2022, over 10,000 hours of preaching was required for a single baptism, and due to the number of Jehovah's Witnesses leaving or dying, it took 40,000 hours of preaching for the number of Jehovah's Witnesses to increase by just 1 person.
In 2022, the period the quote refers to, there was only a 0.4% increase, less than the population growth rate. 1.5 billion hours of preaching is half a billion less hours than 5 years prior. The number baptised was the lowest since 1982. - https://jwfacts.com/watchtower/statistics.php
Since 2010, the majority of growth has come from developing countries in Africa and South America. In 2016, 70% of the increase in average publishers came from just 7 countries, Angola 10k, Brazil 21k, Ecuador 3k, Ghana 4k, Mexico 11k, Rep. of Congo 34k and Nigeria 3k. On the other hand, developed countries with the highest level of wealth, education and internet access to information regarding Watchtower have little to no growth. In 2016, many of these countries reported less publishers than previous year peaks, including Britain, Australia, Germany, Italy, USA, Canada and Japan. - https://jwfacts.com/watchtower/statistics.php
Mormon membership in the U.S. is experiencing a decline in growth rates, with more members leaving the church than those joining, primarily due to falling birthrates and changing societal attitudes. While the church still reports overall growth, particularly outside the U.S., the annual growth rate has slowed significantly compared to previous decades. religionunplugged.com
[And] Both Protestantism and Catholicism experience net loss from switching. In the 2023-24 RLS, 1.8 people have left Protestantism for every person who has become a Protestant after having been raised in another religious group or in no religion. The ratio for Catholicism is even more lopsided: For every U.S. adult who has become a Catholic after being raised in some other religion or without a religion, there are 8.4 adults who say they were raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer describe themselves as Catholics.35
If Protestants are counted as a single category – rather than separated into subgroups such as Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, etc. – then the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) finds that 35% of U.S. adults were raised with a different religious identity than the one they have now.
Overall, 21.9% of U.S. adults are former Christians – people who say they were raised as Christians but no longer identify as such. That’s six times higher than the share of U.S. adults who now identify as Christians after having been raised in some other way (3.6%).
Catholics have experienced the greatest net losses due to switching. About three-in-ten U.S. adults (30.2%) say they were raised Catholic. But 43% of the people raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic, meaning that 12.8% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, 1.5% of U.S. adults have become Catholics after being raised another way. Overall, 18.9% of U.S. adults currently identify as Catholics, according to the new RLS.
Protestantism also has lost more people than it has gained through religious switching. Overall, 13.7% of U.S. adults say they no longer identify with the group after having been raised as Protestants, compared with 7.6% of Americans who were not raised Protestant but now identify as such.
-https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-switching/
I don’t think we should have caucuses in our legislatures or in our forums. Where’s the free exchange of ideas if participation is restricted?
Maybe progressives, trannies, and homos know they have a friend in Rome.
“What’s behind it?”
Tens of millions of Mexicans flooding into our country from the failed Catholic narcocracy known as “Mexico”.
FR has abounded in non-caucus religious threads, often with hundreds and sometimes over thousands of posts. But because there are clear categories in religious members, and religion posters have strong opinions (and in which certain cultic "one true church" contenders persist in posting previously refuted parroted polemics which yet provoke reproof), then members of main categories are given recourse to "members only" threads.
Which have stricter rules. See https://freerepublic.com/%7Ereligionmoderator/
Thank you. I try to respect the members-only articles, as it can get drive-by remarks that don’t have any purpose other than to snipe, but for those with a more of a discoursive purpose, it limits learning the whys and wherefores and maybe giving food for thought.
It would be interesting to see the numbers of the "progressive" organizations vs. the conservative ones.
I put progressive in quotes because they're not progressive. They're regressing back to the sinful ways that have constantly brought judgement.
No, the progressives, trannies are the ones attacking God’s Church.
To be deep in the Bible and Christian history is to be Catholic
Last I saw the Catholic church had it’s own Bible and discouraged the KJV.
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