The Campus Ministry Boom

In his senior year of high school, Chris faced a spiritual crisis. He’d grabbed his brass ring: an invitation to play football at Harvard. It was “the biggest high in my life,” he says. But then the high ended, and he was left feeling empty. “I had put so much reliance on it to give me motivation and hope,” he says. “Like, if I just have this, then I would be happy. It didn’t make me happy.” Chris realized during that difficult senior year that the treadmill of success might be leading him nowhere: “What am I going to set my eyes on next to give me drive and hope? And what if I achieve it?” He began to seek role models and inspiration. He encountered figures like Jordan Peterson, who opened him to the possibility of Christian faith, something that had been a mere background in his childhood.

In his first year at Harvard, he joined a nondenominational Bible and fellowship group, which offered community and spiritual meaning. But he grew dissatisfied with the lack of tradition and authority, the seemingly watered-down teachings, of this form of Christianity. At St. Paul’s, the Catholic parish affiliated with Harvard University, he encountered teachings that felt deeper and more certain. Chris was confirmed in the Catholic Church in the fall of his senior year. He had found in it a “truth that doesn’t change,” one safeguarded by tradition.

Chris’s story is one instance of an increasingly common experience among the current generation of college students, many of whom are turning to the Catholic Church when progressive secular values fail to provide them with meaning and purpose. On many campuses, orthodox and traditional Catholic ministries are thriving. Unchanging truth, often said to be a liability for Christianity, emerges at some junctures as a selling point—now more than ever, as Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) both lacks and desires spiritual and ideological formation to an unprecedented degree. Some of our most talented young people, disillusioned with the scientism and progressivism peddled on elite campuses, are choosing the eternal option: orthodoxy, with all its demands of doctrinal consistency and moral stringency. Many Christian campus ministries are reporting rising levels of interest. But the Catholic ministries seem best able to offer what these young people seek, for reasons partly perennial and partly practical.

Traditional Catholicism is everything the secular world is not. One might be tempted to describe young people’s turn to tradition as a rebellion against rainbow flags and compulsory pronouns. And perhaps some do seek to deploy the rituals and language of the Church in this polemical way. But the larger reality is both more simple and more profound: Catholic campus ministries are thriving because they are firmly anchored in the transformational power of the Gospel.

Beginning with their founding in the late nineteenth century, the historic function of campus Catholic ministries was to serve and support Catholic students who were living away from their homes and parishes. Today, Catholic campus ministries are evangelizing, both to strayed or confused Catholics and to non-Catholics. This change in mission is a response to the collapse in formation among young people: The American National Family Life Survey reports steep and ongoing generational declines in religious affiliation, education, and participation. The typical Zoomer has little or no religious formation, and it would seem that life in a spiritual vacuum isn’t treating them well. The Walton Family Foundation reports that 42 percent of Generation Z experiences depression and hopelessness. The American Psychological Association finds that 91 percent experiences psychological or physical symptoms due to stress. Most alarmingly, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 22 percent of high schoolers in Generation Z have considered suicide, 18 percent have made a plan, and 10 percent have attempted suicide. But not every Zoomer is succumbing to generational malaise. Fr. Ryan Lerner, the chaplain at Yale University’s Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center, observes that today’s students “yearn for the truth, authenticity, and stability.” They make up a vast mission territory.

This yearning was a theme in my conversations this spring with students active in the Catholic campus ministries at Brown, Columbia, and Harvard. All of them, whether they had come to college as Catholics or Protestants or something else, told me stories of spiritual crisis and conversion. Marina is a law student at Columbia. As an undergraduate at Duke, she considered herself a “good Christian,” but she became troubled by the gap between her sense of right and wrong and the drumbeat of progressive truths that surrounded her. Was abortion really so bad? Why shouldn’t gay people get married? She began to wonder whether, in holding to her traditional Christian morality, she might be that dreaded “bigot.” “I kind of felt like I was on my own little lifeboat being tossed around, not sure if I should believe something or not, or if I should live a certain way or not,” she says. At Columbia’s Catholic center, she discovered a solidity and certainty that addressed her need, a “stronghold of values and teaching” upheld over centuries.

The search for legitimate authority seems especially urgent for this generation of young people, who came of age in the era of lockdowns and social distancing. “Scientism was smashed” by the Fauci-led Covid response, says Columbia Catholic chaplain Fr. Roger Landry. The manipulativeness, incoherence, and bad faith behind so many Covid-era policies, and the damage inflicted on students in the name of public health, have undermined young people’s confidence in the neutrality and truth of scientific claims. Landry observes that students have “lost a sense of the authority of science, and so they’re looking for other sources to ground them.” As a result, “they’re open to what the Catholic Church will offer.” Chris sees something similar among his peers at Harvard: “They’re kind of leaning on ‘the science’ . . . to understand what’s true in life, what’s worth pursuing, what’s not. . . . I think they’re seeing that it does not work.”

In the face of demands for “compassion” and “inclusion,” conservative Christian ministries often struggle with how far to accommodate mainstream sexual norms. Recently, Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) has been criticized for liberalizing to accommodate alternative sexual identities. The Church’s teachings on sexuality and personal dignity might be considered a liability on elite campuses, but the students I spoke with have little appetite for “sugarcoating” the truth. Kathryn, a junior who serves on the Harvard Catholic Center student board, is adamant about adhering to orthodoxy: “We don’t shy away from the teachings. You know, the Catholic teachings are what they are. Our Catholic center stays true to that and accurately represents that.” Sophomore student board member John tells me, “We absolutely want to meet people with where they’re at . . . But, you know, we are ultimately rooted in something deeper than ourselves, rooted in that two-thousand-plus-year history and tradition. And at first that can be quite startling.” This same “startling” quality is what makes Catholic ministry unique and attractive. Landry observes that at Columbia, “the vast majority [of students coming to the Merton Center] want the chaplaincy to be Catholic,” that is, to align with orthodox Catholic teachings. “They know what the Catholic Church stands for. And they’d be surprised if we were not pro-life, if we were not pro-family, if we were not pro-chastity, if we were not emphasizing the sacramental life of the church.”

Aaron Renn has argued in these pages (“The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” February 2022) that since about 2014, “society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society.” Yet Zoomers don’t seem burdened by this development. Many young people have no concept at all of what “Christian” or “Catholic” signifies. Fr. Patrick Fiorillo, who was undergraduate chaplain at St. Paul’s in Cambridge for six years until May 2024, remarks of the Harvard undergraduate population: “Your average secular student has no religious background. They don’t come in with a bias against Christianity, as maybe a generation ago.” For a college student in the 2020s, what Christianity is, what it means to live a life of faith, or why anyone would go to church or pray may be wide-open mysteries. Giovanna, who graduated from Brown in 2022, describes her undergraduate cohort as people who “love to deal with hard questions or controversial questions,” and so are open to hearing from traditional religious perspectives. At Harvard, John was pleasantly surprised by the positive response of his peers to his conversion; they displayed “a real openness and a real curiosity towards my faith.” Fr. Edmund McCullough, the chaplain at Brown University from July 2020 to June 2024, believes that current students lack much of the Christian cultural context that would have been assumed a generation ago. But as a result, they don’t have “a lot of misconceptions either. Maybe people are more of a tabula rasa now.”

Of course, there are limits to how comfortable Christian students can feel in voicing their perspectives. In his Harvard classes, Chris tells me, it is assumed that “everybody is on the same page ideologically” and “everybody is very, very liberal.” Speaking up in class can be costly. At Columbia, explains Marina, “People pay attention, people remember things about what’s said in class. . . . You’d get a reputation.” Several students also mention the hazards of online encounters, which combine the claustrophobia of campus life with the anonymity of the screen persona. Online is where the most hostile anti-Christian sentiments are expressed, where a Christian student is liable to be called out as a transphobe or bigot. Even in the relative safety of face-to-face interactions, “It is harder to be Catholic at Harvard,” Kathryn says. “You’re going to have to deal with people who always question the teachings and your beliefs, sometimes maliciously, sometimes just out of unawareness.” The college environment dissolves the boundaries between home and away, school and leisure. A freshman arrives on campus and lives in a dorm with the same people who are in the classroom, in the dining hall, in the clubs, on the sports teams. “It can be very scary to alienate your friends,” says Marina. For her, as for many others, a community of faith provides a bulwark against the social pressure to conform to secular values: “you need a supportive community to give you courage.”

Many of the students with whom I spoke had participated in other Christian groups before deciding for the Catholic Church. The relations among various confessions on campus are characterized by mutual support and encouragement; all confessions share an interest in the flourishing of religious ministries. Students are careful to avoid suggesting a competition or hierarchy among different faith communities. But several factors tip the scales in favor of Catholic ministry for students who are disillusioned with mainstream values.

One weakness of Protestant and nondenominational Christian fellowships arises from the interplay of fragmentation and inclusivity. Few Protestant denominations are big enough to have their own campus groups, so Protestant ministries often bring together multiple denominations under one umbrella. In the absence of a singular tradition, Christian fellowships often cultivate a lowest-common-denominator Christianity, which one student called “wishy-washy.” Chris grew dissatisfied with his nondenominational group at Harvard: “It was very hard to go deep because there wasn’t much formation.” As Marina discovered in a Bible study group at Columbia, when “the goal is to be really inclusive of all Christians,” the “bigger discussions are confined to what there’s consensus on.”

The coherence and depth of Catholic doctrine provide an appealing contrast. Other attractions for the curious and the spiritually bereft include the beauty and peace of the Mass, opportunities for service and charitable work, and counseling offered from a religious rather than therapeutic perspective. Catholic ministries are often visible and well-resourced, with independent budgets, full-time chaplains and staff, and dedicated spaces, in contrast to smaller denominations that rely on university resources and function more like student organizations.

Independent funding and dedicated facilities are especially important in sustaining the integrity of Catholic ministries on campus. In the 2010s, many Christian campus ministries that functioned as student clubs fell afoul of anti-discrimination policies (primarily regarding sexual orientation) because they sought to restrict leadership positions to students who adhered to confessional or behavioral standards. Robert Gregory, the adviser to the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship, which was kicked off campus in 2014, argued that the problem was the lure of “campus rooms, campus vans, campus billboards, and campus funding opportunities for Christian activities.” Too many leaders failed to foresee the consequences of the policy of “doctrinal appeasement” that kept their groups in the good graces of hostile campus administrations.

Catholic campus ministries that are financed through independent parishes and centers evade this demand for concession. At Harvard, the student Masses and activities are run as a Young Adult ministry of St. Paul’s, a Cambridge parish that is not formally affiliated with the university. At Columbia, the Merton Institute is lay-financed and lay-governed, though it is affiliated with the Archdiocese of New York. These ministries are careful to maintain a tone of cooperation and respect toward their host institutions. In turn, and despite the “countercultural” nature of Catholic teaching in the context of the progressive secular university, the attitude of college administrations toward Catholic ministries is generally supportive. One reason, no doubt, is the continued cultural prestige of the Catholic Church. Another may be that the good works of the Church bear fruit on campuses, and administrators can observe that students are well served by the faith.

Though administrative autonomy is important, the beauty and comfort of ministry spaces present more immediate attractions for students. The Golden Center at Yale University, a light-filled expanse completed in 2006, was designed by award-winning architect César Pelli. The Merton Institute at Columbia, which opened in February 2023, is housed in the classically porticoed former rectory of Notre Dame Church, at the edge of the Columbia campus. The renovation provides spaces for the Institute’s formal functions: rooms for seminars and lectures, a beautiful chapel for worship. But for Landry, the informal work of hospitality is just as important. The Institute includes a spacious lounge, inviting kitchen, and quiet spaces for studying and resting. He describes the renovated space as a “home away from home . . . a place where [students] can come and there are snacks and people know their names.”

Hospitality and welcome, grounded in a dedicated physical space, are essential to the success of the Merton Institute and similar centers. The Brown Catholic Center, completed in 2021, occupies a former private home across the street from campus and has become for many students the place in which to spend their free time. It is a place to meet up, to organize events, to drop in and study. It has a multiplier effect: As students are seen to be hanging around and having a good time, other students will come to see the center as an attractive and inviting space. Dan, who graduated from Brown in 2023, emphasizes: “the core mechanism that gets students in the door and then keeps them coming back is [that] they walk in and realize there are normal, interesting, gifted people who have made this their home.”

At both Brown and Columbia, the Catholic centers have been funded and built recently, and the effect of the shift from borrowed and shared space to owned and dedicated space has been profound. For Giovanna, it meant that “after we got the Catholic Center [at Brown], more people started to invite friends.” Joel, a senior at Columbia, matriculated before the opening of the Merton Institute. He recalls his freshman year, when Mass was held in the interfaith chapel: “Here were maybe thirty, forty students, and they would come to dinner after. Maybe you’d get to know them, but you had to work really hard.” Barely two years later, Sunday Mass attendance is above 120, already overflowing the chapel space.

At campus Catholic centers, students experience an atmosphere quite different from the one that prevails on campus. As McCullough remarks of the Brown center, “It feels different in here, the quality of the interactions that they have with people.” Students at competitive institutions like Brown are rewarded for social climbing and career opportunism; they are subtly encouraged to treat others as means, as networking contacts, and as competitors. Against this backdrop of instrumentalized relationships, the social atmosphere cultivated in campus Catholic centers feels liberating. Fiorillo describes one convert who made her home at St. Paul’s: “This was the only place she had encountered on campus where people were interested in her just for who she was, and not for any ulterior motive.” For many students, the experience of social exploitation on campus is compounded by intolerance for viewpoints that run afoul of the liberal consensus. Many come to the Merton Institute because it feels “sane,” Landry observes. “Gender ideology is the real push.” Tolerance is not enough; increasingly, says Landry, professional-class Americans are expected to affirm things that would violate a Christian’s “reason” and “conscience.” At the Merton Institute, where such pressures can be named and discussed, Landry notices that students feel “able to be more fully themselves.” For Marina, Merton is a place “where I can share my whole self, where I can speak about what has meaning to me and what I care about and what I value.”

Fiorillo rejects my suggestion that these centers serve as a retreat from the hostilities of secular college life. He cautions: “If it becomes too much of a kind of refuge, then very quickly you’ll have a lot of people on campus thinking, ‘Oh, the Catholic Center—that’s just that conservative place where those people go.’” Fiorillo, like other ministry leaders, seeks to widen the ministry and is wary of anything that could produce ghettoization. Joel describes the relation of the Merton Institute to the Columbia campus: “I would call it a training ground. Here, students who are really seriously engaging [in their faith] should be training to go out into the rest of Columbia,” to spread the good news and to take a stand for the gospel.

Joel’s fierce spirit of evangelism is echoed by many other students who shared their stories with me. This spirit is characteristic of successful Catholic centers, and it begins with the leadership. The younger priests, who often provide energetic leadership for campus ministries, skew conservative. A recent study reported by Catholic News Agency found “that priests describing themselves as ‘progressive’ are practically going ‘extinct’ among U.S. seminary graduates, with the vast majority of young ordinands describing themselves as conservative and orthodox.” This is the generation formed by John Paul II’s call to a New Evangelization and energized by his theology of the body. The latter addresses questions of sexuality, marriage, and the family—perhaps the most personally salient theological issues for college students—within the context of human nature and human dignity, as an explicit rebuttal to the secular-progressive values of materialism, self-actualization, and radical autonomy.

Campus evangelism leads with the hand and heart rather than the head. I heard little about apologetics, or rational persuasion and argumentation. As Fiorillo puts it, “The goal is not to match people intellectually or to present the gospel in some sort of overly academic way. But really just to meet people and form holy friendships and trusting relationships [so that] they can get in touch with what we believe is the deepest desire of all of our hearts—to know Christ.” Resources are, to be sure, dedicated to formal faith formation, study, and instruction. But welcome, community, and the possibility of authentic and deep friendship lead the way.

Dan grew up a “good Catholic,” faithfully kneeling, praying, and serving at the altar. In high school, he concluded that so long as he did his Catholic best on Sunday, what he did the rest of the week was his own business. Undergraduate life at Brown brought opportunities and temptations. But sometime in his first semester, after yet another week of parties and libations and girls and mornings-after, he started to feel what he calls “the ick.” And the more he felt “the ick,” the more he yearned for something deeper and more satisfying. A missionary from FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) befriended him and gently prodded him to take a look at his behavior. It was this friendship that led Dan out of temptation and into a life-altering relation with Christ—and eventually a vocation to serve the Church as a FOCUS missionary.

FOCUS is a “dynamically orthodox” Catholic outreach organization that fields more than nine hundred peer missionaries at nearly two hundred colleges and universities. There are FOCUS teams at Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Penn, and at other highly ranked schools such as Johns Hopkins, MIT, NYU, and UC Berkeley. Ben Kelly, the FOCUS regional director for thirty-three New England campuses, told me that quantitative measures of student engagement at schools with FOCUS teams, including mass attendance, Bible study attendance, and students in discipleship or mentorship relationships, “are basically the highest they’ve ever been, on every campus.” This vitality is not confined to the activation of cradle Catholics. The numbers of inquirers and catechumens in many campus OCIA classes (adult preparation for baptism or reception into the Church) are at historic highs, with more than twenty per year at the Merton Institute and more than thirty per year at St. Paul’s.

FOCUS missionaries are recent college graduates who dedicate a minimum of two years to full-time mission service, usually in teams of four. They receive training in outreach techniques and Catholic doctrine. FOCUS missionaries spend their time engaging with students, striking up conversations, and establishing friendships. They shepherd students into a deeper engagement with their faith, whether the student begins as a lapsed cultural Catholic, a practicing Catholic, or a seeker from a different background. For many students, FOCUS missionaries are their point of entry to the campus Catholic center. Azul, the student board president at the Harvard center, praised the FOCUS missionaries for doing “an awesome job in bringing people into religious spaces, especially people who wouldn’t otherwise come.” The most important element is the person-to-person contact: “It all starts with a personal invitation.”

FOCUS has been described as “Campus Crusade for Catholicism,” and has adopted a style of friendship and accessibility similar to that of the interdenominational Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru). But in contrast to the big-tent faith of evangelical campus ministry, FOCUS points directly to Catholic orthodoxy. That orthodoxy includes traditional moral teaching. Dan tells me that FOCUS is “unafraid to share the truth about the call to chastity and what God made sexuality for, that God made men and women different and in a complementary way, that marriage is supposed to be between one man and one woman.” On secular college campuses, where sexual experimentation, drug and alcohol abuse, and raw greed are often thought not only acceptable but laudable, FOCUS missionaries strive to live as examples of sobriety, chastity, and self-sacrifice. Joel’s encounter with FOCUS missionaries at Columbia was “just huge for me, seeing the kind of life of faith that they lived.”

Evangelism is a delicate dance between accepting people as they are and challenging them to become something more. Landry describes it as an expanding circle of welcome, from the ministry that welcomes the newcomer to the newcomer’s own welcome of a challenging and transformative faith: “My goal here is to let the desire to welcome everybody be the dominant thing that people see about our chaplaincy. And then once they’re welcomed, once they’re coming, to try to help them open up to welcome everything that the church teaches and to see how it is coherent.” The sense of welcome builds trust, and trust opens the door for more difficult conversations. Fiorillo explains: “When they trust us, whether it’s me personally or say my missionaries or just other student leaders . . . you can talk about any of that stuff very freely and sincerely and openly.”

The peer-to-peer evangelism promoted by FOCUS is a “virtuous cycle,” expanding ministry outward. FOCUS teams begin on a campus by connecting with students who are already active in campus ministry. The objective is to train those students to “reach their friends, roommates, teammates who maybe don’t have any background at all in Christianity,” Ben Kelly explains. This approach to evangelization has the potential to transform Catholic campus ministries from their historical origins in cultural defense (or, more recently, neutral dialogue). Dan remarks, “No baptized Christian is somehow automatically exempt from the great commission.” The effect of evangelizers teaching evangelism is powerful, as Fiorillo explains: “If you can form just a few people really well, the work that they can then do to continue that work of evangelization is amazing.” To date, FOCUS boasts 70,000 missionary and student alumni, of whom 15,000 have received training in “post-graduate evangelization.” As these graduates move into adult lives, parishes are being salted with a generation of evangelizers who are formed in the orthodox tradition, and who have the skills and passion to preserve and spread Christ’s redeeming word.

Today, the redeeming message of the gospel provides answers and hope to a generation of young people experiencing cultural and social upheaval—as it always has. What is notable at this moment in American Christian evangelism is the fact that aspects of Catholic faith and practice exert appeal for non-Catholics, in a context in which many spiritual and religious groups are vying for attention and adherence. The Catholic Church asserts unity and certainty, and its claims of continuous history and tradition are compelling in light of the liquefaction of every certainty and truth.

The growth of Catholic campus ministries is good news for the future of the Catholic Church in America. But I don’t think this story is merely one of sectarian success. Catholic ministries that evangelize an orthodox faith do things that are increasingly rare: They hold fast to doctrine and tradition, resist the demands of secular conformity, and embody and offer a countercultural alternative. Many young people are seeking just such an alternative, and the emergence of orthodox Catholic ministries in places where young people can best encounter them is a powerful development. The future of orthodox Christianity in America is being seeded today in Catholic campus ministries.

Samira Kawash is professor emerita at Rutgers University.

Editors' note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Columbia University student boards and student leaders serve under its chaplains and staff and do not function as student organizations.

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