"Something is Moving in the Church and We Should Pay Attention" | June 28, 2026

Good news can feel almost suspicious when you have lived through decades of grim headlines about the Church. We are seeing something different right now: record numbers of adult converts at Easter, packed Rite of Election liturgies here in Oklahoma, and even surprising reports from places like France. I walk through what we are hearing on the ground and why it may signal a real moment of Catholic renewal, not just a feel-good story.

I have seen spikes come and go, and sometimes big numbers are just big numbers. Still, it is worth asking what God may be doing in our time. My best read is simple: people are starving for meaning, they have tried “everything else,” and they are finally ready for a road that leads somewhere. And underneath all of that is the deepest attraction of the Church: not perfection, but forgiveness and redemption.

************

Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Surprising Signs Of Church Growth

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. And what's going on in the Catholic Church? It's a question very much on the mind of everybody these days, at least here in the U.S. There are signs of vitality and dynamism no one thought probable. When faced by good news, we hardly know what to do, given the history we've shared over the last couple of decades. What are we to make of what's going on? This last Easter we were showered with all kinds of news about the record number of people entering the church this year. Mostly their new adult converts who've decided to embrace the life of the faith and turn their pathway to the gift of the Catholic Church. Dioceses all over have reported huge numbers of people crowding into their parishes collectively over these last few years. In fact, to the great surprise of people just about everywhere, even France reported a record-breaking number of adult converts who were preparing to enter the church at Easter. Everyone can make an exception for the religious enthusiasms of the United States and massage the numbers of those who have made their preferences known. But France, that was a surprise to everyone, and an indication that this may be a moment in which something is moving among us, something larger than we had thought. It's an experience duplicated here in Oklahoma where we've had a significant increase in those who've embraced the faith. In fact, one of the challenges of the Linton season this year was what we do at the rite of election. That's the liturgy in which we welcome those who are preparing to receive the Easter sacraments of initiation at the Easter vigil. This year, as we set out on our Linton journey, it was clear that the shrine would not be large enough to accommodate all of the people who were to be enrolled as catechumens and candidates. Eventually, there had to be a reworking of the process and a division of those who were to be enrolled that day. It worked out very well and was a great dignified ceremony for all of those who were part of it, but next year, if there are as if there are any more people to be accommodated, we may be facing a whole new set of challenges. What an amazing

Rite Of Election Overflow

SPEAKER_00 2:35

problem to have. Not only that, recently I spoke to the vocations director for the Archdiocese. He had a number of really interesting and apropos things to say about his job. In his conversations about young men who've indicated their interest and their willingness to go to the seminary, he noted that most of them are very much younger than in the previous generation. It's a wonderful time among us in which there seems to be a renewed interest in the life of the priesthood. But a most notable aspect of that interest is that it is expressed and shared by younger and younger men. This seems to indicate a level of interest and a willingness to invest in the calling as a much more powerful element in their lives than has been the case previously. When young men wake up to hearing a call from the Lord, there is something moving among us. Not only is this the case among us here in our diocese, it's a trend across the country. In fact, one of the problems he most encounters, the vocations director, is that seminaries are full and can't accommodate the young men that we'd like to send them. It's true, of course, the institutions have diminished over the last two generations, so we're not talking about a huge number of reclaimed spaces, but it is a startling fact to know the seminaries now operating are, all over the country, reaching a maximum. They're having a hard time keeping up. This was something hardly anyone expected anywhere. A number of the seminaries we work with to form our young men are engaged in capital campaigns to raise money to improve and expand their facilities. It's been a long time since any talk of making seminaries larger has been regarded as a good investment. But it's become a trend long enough to have engaged the imagination and the resources of people all over the country. Something is going on. Not only

A Boom In New Ministries

SPEAKER_00 4:30

is this the case among these signal areas where there's there is a more hidden aspect of the church that's growing like crazy as well. You'd be excused for not noticing it, as it's not much reported on in the news. In fact, it's one of those elements of life that is hidden in plain notice, so no one thinks about reporting on it at all, since everyone can see it already. But that makes it all the more intriguing and interesting. It's the growth of professional service ministries throughout the church and all over the country. We're members of an experience of the church that just hasn't happened before, and yet here it is taking place all around us. And by this, I mean those people who've put together their own enterprises in order to make their services available to parishes and pastors and populations that have not been served previously. Over the last couple of decades, it has become more and more common for leaders to identify what people in the church need and then organize a way to respond to those needs, most often in ways outside of the traditional avenues of ministry and service. And since we live in a society in which it is common to engage everyone in a transactional service in order to get things done, these ministries operate according to this model. People found their ministries to meet particular needs, and when they do, they put themselves in positions to sustain themselves in their work in the marketplace. It's a new way to make things happen. Right now I could Google perhaps three dozen organizations dealing with the concerns about sex education and formation for young people. These are groups dedicated to teaching the authentic insights and doctrine of the Catholic Church in the most incisive and faithful ways available. They offer their services so that the goodness and wisdom of the Church can be available to the greatest number of people. The same is true of ministries and prisons among young adults who are looking to deepen the faith, among those who question their sexuality and want to respond to the church's teaching, as well as those who want to balance their business lives with their spiritual growth. And those are no more than a few random topics from off the top of my head. There are dozens of organizations who are sincerely dedicated to making the teaching of the church and the life of the faith come alive in authentic and faithful expressions. It's a new age being born among us, and it's happening right now. There's never been a time like it before. That's not quite quite fair to say. Of course, there have been many ages in the church in which dynamic new things were taking place all over, so much so the church wondered how to contain it all. And that's the case happening among us these days. But what makes our age different and distinctive is that these initiatives are finding expressions in ways we're not used to. There has never been a time in which so many people have been so formally educated and formed in the life and doctrines of the church. As a corollary to their formation, there's hardly ever been a time in which so many people have wanted to bolster the faith with such compassion and commitment. Over the years, they've worked to do so in ways peculiar to our age and situation. It's a whole new world out there, and they're a part of it. It's astounding, and I think it's only going to become larger. In the midst of all this, the normal pathways of ministry and service are not drying up. They're being renewed as well. Religious life in the orders and movements of dedicated priests and sisters are also being renewed. Not each one everywhere, but many of the orders most dedicated to the most pressing service to the needs of the church, have found themselves filled with newer members who are enthused to take part in the charism of these groups. It hasn't been some sort of multiplication of the loaves and fishes, miraculous in its providential multiplication, but the growth of these groups have been steady. Those who pay attention to such things often remark, sometimes with true amazement, that the most remarkable part of them is how many young people fill up their numbers. There is a kind of springtime in the church these days, and we all want to know what it means. At least that's the most common commentary about these phenomena in the news these days. I look around at the confusions and the contratempts of society. Most people want to know what it means that so much is going on in our parishes and among our young people. Just exactly where do these facts fit in when it comes to understanding the church and society? We know and understand the reporting about the church suffering and getting smaller. What do we do about reports in contrast to this? It's a curious time. Personally,

Caution About Short-Term Spikes

SPEAKER_00 9:16

I've wanted to stay away from commenting too much about it. I see the numbers like everyone else. The presence of so many people causes me to wonder about what's going on as much as anybody else. But I'm old enough and have seen enough misplaced enthusiasm over my years to counsel caution. It's easy to make a big deal out of a temporary trend and then later discover that the excitement was a lot of smoke without much heat. Generally, I've mostly been content to wait and see. If it's a good trend, then it'll become we'll become more aware of what it means. Until then, I've tried to contain my enthusiasm. Let me give you an example. When I went to the seminary in 1975, there were a total of 14 seminarians for the whole Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Of that number, more than half had joined just that year, meaning that in the previous years, there at the previous year that had hardly been 10. Over the years, the number slowly crept upwards, but not dramatically. When I was ordained in 1981, after six years, there were something like twenty five seminarians. Now, that's better than 14, but it wasn't revolutionary. But beginning in about 1986, there was a huge uptick in the number of guys applying and then going to the seminary for Oklahoma. This was true in Tulsa as it was in Oklahoma City. For four years in a row, we had more than 10 men a year applying and going to the seminary for each diocese. In Oklahoma City, by the early 1990s, there were more than 50 men studying for us. It was dramatic. We all asked ourselves what this trend meant. And none of us could call what could identify a cause exactly. Of course, we did think of the example of the martyrdom of Blessed Stanley, but none of us knew in any detailed way what his role played in the decision making of these young men who chose to go to the seminary. For the most part, they never mentioned him as an element of their discernment and decision making. And so we never did come up with an answer. After a few years of growth, the spurt was over. In the course of about ten years, in which we ordained very large classes of young men to the priesthood in both dioceses, numbers that rivaled the great classes of the 1950s, the number of seminarians returned to the mean. A few men each year applied and were accepted. We slid back down to the teens as we had been in the past. We never did find out exactly what caused the gigantic increase, and we weren't able to recapitulate it in our practice or our expectations. It came and went. So I've been watching the numbers and wondering to myself what they might portend. The grumpy experience part of me wants to continue to wait and see if there'll be any great societal meaning to them. One of the conclusions to draw about them is that they're simply the product of big numbers. That is, if you wait long enough and are dealing with a large enough sample size, it's not unusual to have significant spikes in activity. If you focus solely on the short term, these can look startling and powerful. But if you wait, the power of big numbers has the small eruption returned to the general mean and all is as before. It's another way to say that it's only a blip on the screen and it won't really mean anything. That's certainly a possibility. All the reporting aside, maybe maybe it's nothing. It's the reverse climate doom prediction process in action with regard to the church. That is, we get heated up over a bit of news that's small and make all manner of extrapolation from it and reach all kinds of wild conclusions that have no chance of panning out. It could be that this news is going to turn out to signify nothing. The other way to look at these reports is to observe that if they indicate some sort of meaningful trend, we're too close to see it and to make sense of it. It's an often repeated fact that those who are part of great changes in society are often not equipped to evaluate or even pay attention to what's going on around them. What we get used to becomes the norm for us. We hardly notice how different it is or how odd it might be compared to yesterday when we were used to something else. Since we have the capacity to forget almost everything and get used to almost anything, we're not well equipped to evaluate exactly what's going on around us. It may be the case that deep currents are rearranging our lives, but the last thing we really pay attention to are the deepest of them among us. That's what happens, for example, if we look at a video of some event or activity from 50 or 70 years ago. This seems to be more and more popular on social media these days. Some will put up a recording of a baseball game or a day at the beach or a party from, say, 1970, and everyone will marvel at what has changed since then. We can look at it, and it all looks normal and congenial to us. But the first thing we notice is that we haven't noticed how things really are different than they were all those years ago. People in styles and the way so many carry themselves and what they're doing, the ease or discomfort we notice, all these things come immediately to mind. And it takes a jolt like this, a stark reminder for us to know that little by little trends have manifested themselves and we hardly even notice at all. It could be the case, and it often truly is the case, that we are simply not empowered right now to notice what's happening among us. The numbers tell a story, we just don't know what it might be. But

Why People Crave Meaning Again

SPEAKER_00 15:04

when we get out from under these caveats and cautions, we're empowered to think about what might be going on amid the good news coming our way. Let's not fall into the trap of previous years and conclude there's nothing good in good news. That's an artifact of previous ages. One of our major Catholic publications and media outlets always seem to champion. What indeed could it mean that things could be for a time right now in our circumference, circumstances for today are looking positive. Maybe the Lord has some things in mind for us that we would do well to pay attention to. The first would be that our society at our time is on the lookout for what is meaningful and purposeful. We were built to be part of a world in which we are resident. That is, we've been placed into the creation at its apex and as its principle. We don't survive without a sense of where we are and what we're here for. We're not tourists, nor are we superfluous to the cycle of nature. We belong here. This is a statement of faith. I can't prove that by looking at the bare facts of nature, although I can posit it with certainty by looking at the behavior of every person I've ever met in real life or in fiction. It is a part of what it means to be a human being. We all chase after the foundation of meaning and are restless until we can grab on to something with purpose and goal. Think of the character Sherlock Holmes and his quest to unravel the mystery of what really happens in the cases brought to him. Holmes is dedicated to deductive reasoning based on the presumption of purposeful behavior and meaningful action. That is, he's successful as a detective because he's able to connect what seems to be random facts with the truth that all behavior has behind it some directed purpose. While he makes a fanaticism of facts, he doesn't collect them randomly, but because they build to disclose a purpose and the succession of events disclosing what that purpose is. We love this character because he solves the mysteries of life filling his days. But we also love the character because he does for us what we all want to see in our own lives. He's the one, he's one of the most well-known characters in literature because he stands in for all of us. We all want to know mysteries can be solved and the unknown can be pierced. Be they weird or obtuse, the conundrums of his cases yield to the hard conclusions of his methods. We want to know he is successful. It's not an accident of history or of method that Sigmund Freud's favorite fiction was the stories of Sherlock Holmes. He wanted, we want, to know life gives way to purpose and method, which is why there is a record number of people who are moving toward the invitation to find the purpose of life in the proclamation of the gospel. They're responding to the offer of the Catholic Church to know their lives have a place in the plan of God and the world. As Father Ronald Rollheiser has reminded us, there is a God-shaped hole in our hearts. We are restless until we have filled it. This sounds more spiritual and more remote than it is, in fact. We long to know there is truly a mystery in our lives. That is, we long to know we are more than simply the product of time, energy, and the void, and our lives are moving to some meaning and purpose. We want to know there is a detective who can read the clues, who can tell us what's happened, and can tell us what's going on. And in our world, that is the church. Paying attention to the life of the church is the response of this generation to the confusions and proliferations of our time. It's prosaic to say, but they found a Baker Street address where their questions can be answered. That's why, that's what so many were lining up at the shrine at the rite of election to celebrate. At last they found what they were looking for: someone who could find them.

Freedom Without Limits Turns Dark

SPEAKER_00 19:17

The second aspect of what's happening among us is that we are standing at the long end of those who've tried everything else. This seems almost foolish to say, but the more I consider it, the more it seems true to be. Could it be we have tried everything? Certainly there is a depth and breadth to vice and depravity that surprises most of us. But evil is necessarily limited. It has no creativity all its own. It can't delight in its deprivation or glory in its misdirection without emptying itself out. Once you open the gates and let down the fences, there's not much more that can be done. The product is boredom and depression. Once we get there, where we have seen where we seem to have arrived in our day and time, there's not much more places to go, except to opt for the possibility of virtue and purpose. Several years ago, I ran into a very young man sitting on a bench outside of the rectory at the church in Still in Shawnee. He told me his mother had died and his father had let him know that he'd take care of him, but he, the young man, was on his own. There'd be a house and food and a bed and enough money to get by on, but dad wasn't going to be present for anything. This was offered as a gift, with the additional bow that dad would not constrain his son in any way. He was free to come and go or not or do and to do or not do just as he wanted, with no judgment or condemnation. The boy at that time was about fourteen, and he wandered around town doing anything he could find to do. When I talked to him, he admitted that he had done just about everything, everything anyone could do. In fact, he said he'd done so much that he couldn't think of anything else there was to do. At age sixteen, he was considering suicide. There was no more of life to look forward to, and no more mysteries available to him. He was a perfect child of our age, no constraints, no conscience, no capacities, and no clues. When society is filled with those who have no place to go, they come to the place of promise. And when they do, we shouldn't be surprised they're ready to give themselves to what will fill their lives. While we're still schooled to resist discipline and avoid constraint, they've wandered on the open prairie of loneliness until they long to find a road leading to the horizon. The promise of the gospel in the invitation to the church provides this for them. People are not finding their way to the church despite its commands and its demands, but because of them. And finally, I think the possibilities inherent in the promise of forgiveness is irresistible and the most necessary part of the gift of the church to our society.

The Deep Need For Forgiveness

SPEAKER_00 22:18

For the last several generations, we've placed such a premium on the wealth of possibilities and the surfeit of potential in our lives that everyone feels a measure of guilt about not having achieved the best self that he or she has been promised. Everyone has sinned against their potential and has offended the promise of their humanity. Not only that, every person has deviated from a promise of perfection. We don't imagine this is such a big deal. We're ready to make an excuse and to make way for sh moral shortcomings. But when we look in the mirror and realize how much we've messed up what we might do and how we might live the life we've been promised, we're not shown a way to retrieve what we've lost. It's perfection or it's nothing. And since imperfection is the norm for our fallen world, we all walk around seeing in the mirror of our lives a broken promise screaming out from us. Our hunger is to be forgiven and to know there remains some hope for us. We long for redemption, not perfection. We all know we won't be able to realize the lofty promises and sure accomplishments of perfection. We want to know that where we are and what we've done to ourselves in our world is retrievable. We long to know there can be a promise that extends to us from where we are right now, that the world we are a part of has something to give us, rather than being only the place where we're reminded of how we've fallen short and can never get to where we're going. The people of this generation are longing to be redeemed, and they come to the church to find it. We preach not just salvation as the promise of a life lived well enough or an accomplishment of a project done right, but redemption as the gift of God to us, as the beginning place of goodness right now. This moment is God's doing. Whether it lasts for ages or for only a moment, it is an artifact of our day and time. I propose we enjoy it for what it is, our day and our time, and that we give thanks for what God has done for us. We might take a moment and talk a bit with those who are newly among us. Maybe they have a thing or two to tell us about what it means to trust in God who does not abandon his church or leave his people alone. Back in just a moment. We have

Poem The Rules Of Life

SPEAKER_00 25:11

a poem today called The Rules of Life. The rules of life are hidden within our days, as they succeed one another on our calendar squares, lying there the landscape of life in the thick haze that only further living can render bare. They are no more than we commonly know, revealed to all, or to just about everyone, brought to sprout because carefully sown, harvested in the brightest noonday sun. Treat as you would be treated all in turn, make your enemy your neighbor as you. From them you widen your world, you learn. The world is made for all, not just one, but two. And at bottom lies the deepest foundation, the stone in touch with the deepest bedrock, the one on the cross, the author of creation, happens to be the shepherd of the world's flock. And all is given in truth fully for our good, that we might each prosper in our own time, and bring creation's old gardens and woods, so that in our struggle we can all learn in s in time. That's the rules of life.

How To Listen And Where To Find Us

SPEAKER_00 26:52

We are on our podcast. Just go to uh your sources for podcasts and look up Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. You can also access us on the uh webpage for uh Oklahoma Catholic Broadcasting. Go to um your search engine, put in Oklahoma Catholic Broadcasting, bring up the website, and then look for previous programs. You'll come across Living Catholic. You can look uh by uh navigating your way around the website, easily come to our previous programs. They're uh archived there. So if you're interested in what we've done in the past, you can go there and find us uh present for several years now. And uh what we intend to do is what we uh are continuing to do here, which is to continue to explore what it means to be living Catholic in all of its um depth and all of its profundity for us. I hope you can join us in the weeks to come.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.