After the Revival: How Ohio State is preparing a wave of Catholic converts for life in ordinary time

They’ve tossed their mortarboard caps, cleared out their dorms and set out to begin careers. A notable subset of recent college graduates, in addition to moving dozens of plastic totes back to their parents’ house and reporting to their new jobs, are also on the hunt for vibrant parishes in their new cities to take the place of dynamic campus ministries. This past Easter Vigil, buzzy headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post and dozens of other outlets, both religious and secular, reported that a surge of young adults at colleges and urban parishes were entering into full communion with the Catholic Church. Recent young adult converts and college directors of the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults spoke with America about how they are experiencing the “Gen Z revival” on the ground and about life after O.C.I.A. Participants in college and young adult ministry described vibrant campus faith communities that attracted new members organically, usually through existing relationships with Catholic peers. And although some cities and parishes may offer thriving young adult ministries that will help these recent graduates maintain this momentum, this experience is hardly universal. As the O.C.I.A. class of 2026 heads out to be salt and light to the world, campus ministers are trying to equip students for the uneven terrain of the U.S. Catholic parish landscape. Buckeye Catholic is the Ohio State University Catholic campus ministry housed at the St. Thomas More Newman Center in Columbus, Ohio. According to their O.C.I.A. director, Sarah Botti, Buckeye Catholic boasts a staff of around 25 dedicated to operations, development and advancement, as well as campus missionaries from FOCUS and Saint Paul’s Outreach. Well-resourced with priests, religious sisters and deacons, as well as new facilities, Ms. Botti describes a flourishing Buckeye Catholic community that offers Mass twice daily, perpetual adoration and ample opportunities for confession. “We’re at capacity, most Masses,” Ms. Botti said. “These are just really big spikes that we’re seeing.” A convert and recent O.S.U. graduate herself, she has witnessed this growth firsthand. “A lot changed my sophomore year,” she said. “Somewhere around 2022, there were 10 students who converted to Catholicism…. Last year, it was 47.” Ms. Botti said at the Easter Vigil in 2026, her program welcomed 73 people into the church: 48 candidates (baptized Christians seeking full communion with the Catholic Church) and 25 catechumens (unbaptized persons seeking to join the Catholic Church). After confirmation, the final phase in the O.C.I.A. process is called mystagogy, a time of reflection for the newly initiated that occurs between Easter and Pentecost. But mystagogy can be a challenge on a college campus, since it usually coincides with preparation for finals and graduation. Ms. Botti recognizes that college converts have unique considerations. “They have three to four months where we might be sending them back to a family that isn’t supportive of the decision, or doesn’t even know about the decision,” she said. “It was definitely a worry for me last summer,” Ty Sibert, an O.S.U. senior who grew up in a nonreligious household and came into the church last year, said. “Not really being around too many Catholics, not being able to lean on anyone.” Ms. Botti’s colleague Dana Dosen is the assistant director of advancement for Buckeye Catholic. She said that when campus ministers prepare students to leave Buckeye Catholic’s close-knit and active community, they liken the mindset to that of a paratrooper getting ready to jump out of an airplane: “Where is my target? What obstacles am I going to face when I land on the ground, and what is my goal? What supplies do I need to bring with me?” To assist them with this, Ms. Botti said she has collected information on where seniors are moving after graduation, so they can plug into a parish in their new city or state right away if they wish. And she has big ideas for the returning students in the fall. Ms. Botti wants to send a message to these neophyte Catholics: “We want you to come back and stay involved.” She calls it “Track 2 formation.” During Track 2, facilitated by a team of student leaders who are primarily converts themselves, students who came into the church at Easter will hear more from priests at the Newman Center about the theology they were introduced to during O.C.I.A. “It’s their intellectual training,” Ms. Botti said. But Track 2 formation does not stop there. “Something that we see happening a lot is when students learn about the truths of the church, they get really passionate about it,” she said, “Then they don’t really know how to communicate about it.” At the time we spoke, Ms. Botti was planning to launch role-playing workshops to help these new Catholics learn to balance zeal with common sense and good manners. “I’ve had a few students approach me [asking], ‘How do I talk about the Eucharist with my Protestant friends?’,” Ms. Botti said. Her goal is to help converts speak the truth in love. She envisions the workshops teaching students to determine what kind of engagement would be situationally appropriate for this topic—discerning whether it is the right time to go in depth, and even whether the listener is actually interested. Other considerations Ms. Botti hopes to help students incorporate into their evangelization are finding common ground with various religious and cultural perspectives through intellectual humility and asking questions in return. “If you want people to be curious about your faith, can you be curious about theirs first, and see where that leads you?” she said. “I think just training people to be curious is one of the most important things for emotional intelligence.” Ms. Botti is aware of the Gen-Z revival hype in the media, but she is skeptical of a particular critique: that a toxic brew of celebrities, political influencers and conservative politics is driving the uptick in interest in Catholicism. A 2024 Vanity Fair headline called it “the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex.” “I definitely have heard talk about that being a trend to watch,” Ms. Botti said. But she would not characterize this recent crop of O.C.I.A. students as very politically engaged, noting that it may be more common among young adults in their mid 20s or 30s. “That’s something that I see here and there,” she said. “I don’t see that as much with students.” While she said the young people she encounters may have initially explored Catholicism online from what she calls “mainstream” influencers like Father Mike Schmitz or Bishop Robert Barron, they are brought more deeply into the faith through “personal discipleship,” she said. “They start asking questions about the sacraments; they begin coming around community events. There’s a lot of genuine faith.” A Community of Faith Ryan Richardson, L.C., is the O.C.I.A. director at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan. He agreed with Ms. Botti’s assessment that the post-college young adults are arriving at Catholicism in a slightly different way than undergraduate students. At a Catholic institution like Benedictine, however, he said Catholicism’s appeal is more relational than intellectual or ideological. Father Richardson said most of Benedictine’s O.C.I.A. candidates are student-athletes who attend on sports scholarships. What attracts them to the faith is not an influencer or politician but “the joy of their [Catholic] teammates,” which they see up close from “living life with these people. Their attraction to the faith is very much linked to community.” In describing their experiences, the students who have recently completed O.C.I.A. echo Father Richardson. Ben Andrews was confirmed through Buckeye Catholic in 2025. After becoming interested in Christianity as a freshman, online research initially led him in an anti-Catholic direction. “Quora and Reddit were my guide,” Mr. Andrews said. But it was real-life friendships that brought him to Catholicism. “I went to Mass for the first time with one of my best friends,” he said, while working as a summer camp instructor. It was Ms. Botti, his co-worker at the camp at the time, who served as his apologist and answered his questions. “She really opened my heart up to it in an intellectual way,” he said, “just gave me a really deep desire to receive Jesus in the Eucharist.” Mr. Sibert also began exploring Christianity in his freshman year, in his case after a personal mental health crisis. “I knew how happy Christians were,” he said. “One of my best friends in high school was evangelical, and he always seemed like a pretty stable guy.” So Mr. Sibert picked up a Bible for the first time and attended a Sunday Mass soon after. “I thought the liturgy was really beautiful,” he said. The mother of a girl he was dating at the time was Catholic, and served as an early point of reference. Now, Mr. Sibert says, his sister is also entering the faith. The college O.C.I.A. directors who spoke with America hope that interpersonal relationships that developed during O.C.I.A. will sustain young converts as they head out into the world—and potentially model for their new parish the kind of community they experienced as undergraduates. Matt Kuizon, the director of faith formation at the University of South Florida’s Catholic Student Center in Tampa, and his wife understand the student experience of campus ministry from participating in FOCUS as undergraduates. “We rely still to this day on a lot of our relationships that we established at the time,” he said. “The importance of deep friendships rooted in faith has really sustained us.” He said that while his O.C.I.A. program has seen more modest growth than some of the headline-grabbing parishes, he is excited to be one of what he calls the “little fires” igniting around the country. Mr. Kuizon aims to create a similar environment for U.S.F. students to the one he had as an undergraduate, laying the groundwork for a network that they can tap into wherever they end up. That means preparing them to integrate into parish life after graduation. It also means exposing O.C.I.A. students to other parishes and young adult organizations outside of their campus bubble. Ms. Dosen says that life after O.C.I.A. for Buckeye Catholics who stay in Columbus can be vibrant. “Morning and evening you could be at some kind of ‘young adult’ something,” she said of the available opportunities, “You could have two plans every night of the week,” with various lay-led ground-up initiatives, including men’s and women’s small groups that meet regularly around the city. Columbus Coffee Club, for example, is an Instagram account intended to cultivate an organic Catholic young adult community through monthly meetups. Their grid features smiling, clean-cut and fresh-faced local young adults. You simply tap the Partiful link in their bio to get on the list. But the reality of young adult Catholic life doesn’t always look like Instagram or TikTok. “I was trying to get a young adult group going on the east side [of Columbus],” Ms. Dosen said. “But it wasn’t really holding traction, and I realized it’s because there’s actually just a less concentrated demographic” of young adults in that part of the city. “It’s kind of this numbers game, you don’t want to admit it, but it is a little bit.” Most of the young Catholic adults are concentrated on the city’s west side, with St. Christopher’s parish serving as a major hub. The parish is located near Columbus’ Grandview neighborhood, home to a lot of young recent college graduates. It also houses its own young professional group. More than one person I spoke to mentioned Young Catholic Professionals, a networking group with chapters in major U.S. cities, as a potential post-college source of community. Y.C.P. offers happy hours, executive speaker series, conferences and mentorship opportunities. While this can be a great way to meet other Catholics from similar backgrounds, it attests to the uneven growth of Catholicism in the United States outside of the college-educated and upwardly mobile. Leaving the Nest Political scientist Ryan Burge called the recent wave of young Catholic converts part of a “bougie revival” in a recent National Catholic Register article titled, “Why a Catholic ‘Revival’ May Be Leaving the Working Class Behind.” The article painted a picture of “dioceses with large working-class and rural populations, where overall conversion rates went up this year but not necessarily among the blue-collar demographic.” Often, social media portrays a young adult Catholic lifestyle that suggests affluence or is at least aspirational. This is probably one of the rare instances of social media reflecting real life. Mr. Burge writes and speaks frequently about how, in the United States, Americans with higher educational attainment are more likely to be churchgoers than people without college diplomas (30 percent of those with post-graduate degrees compared with 23 percent with only a high school diploma). This suggests a potential blind spot for boosters of the Zoomer revival. While both the students and O.C.I.A. directors who spoke to America were keen to highlight their successful evangelization and community-building efforts, it remains to be seen how this will translate into action. When asked about service projects, Ms. Dosen said Buckeye Catholic has a service subcommittee that does regular service events, but noted that there were many existing service organizations on campus in which students are active. “We want it to be from a pure place in the heart,” she said. But with the seeds of faith just planted, those hoping for a fruitful harvest may need to be patient. Mr. Kuizon is hopeful. As young adult converts integrate into new Catholic communities after college, “I think that’s where a lot of the long-term fruit is going to…bear out,” he said. Getting used to a new normal while holding onto faith can be hard, but college O.C.I.A. programs are preparing students for that reality. Recent college graduate Abby Diyanni was confirmed through O.C.I.A. in 2025 and initially found juggling work-life balance to be a challenge. A sales rep for the Hershey Company, she said her schedule is busy, and overtime is frequently part of the job. “Practicing my faith throughout the week, I’ve made it work,” she said. “But at first it was pretty discouraging.” Worried about spiritual dryness, she remembered that her O.C.I.A. director in college said there would be days like these. “The spirits of conflict, the desolation,” she said, “[He told us] like, just practical ways of how to handle these moments and to not become overly afraid even when it does happen.” Today, she continues to stay involved at her new parish when her work schedule allows, helping out with the O.C.I.A. program. As she answers questions and accompanies O.C.I.A. candidates, “I try not to be outwardly too overjoyed,” she said, remembering when she was in their shoes not too long ago and not wanting to scare them away with her enthusiasm. “It’s a beautiful thing to be able to be on the other side.” The college O.C.I.A. converts who spoke to America feel prepared to leave the nest, intellectually and socially. Both Mr. Sibert and Mr. Andrews went on after they were confirmed to become student leaders in Buckeye Catholic’s O.C.I.A. program. Mr. Sibert will serve as a FOCUS missionary at another campus after he graduates this spring. He admits to a bit of imposter syndrome as a recent convert, but he realizes the wider American church needs people like him—knowledgeable Catholics who are on fire for their faith. “I’m kind of realizing that there are a lot of people in the church that don’t really know about a lot of the truths of Catholicism,” Mr. Sibert said. He said attending the parish in his hometown in the community of Lima, Ohio, this past summer opened his eyes to what he described as a kind of spiritual desolation. “I was really surprised,” said Mr. Sibert, given Lima’s deep and longstanding history with Catholicism. Like many areas in the Northeast and Rust Belt, Catholicism’s influence in Lima is weakening. Mass attendance decreased by around 25 percent between 2014 and 2025 in the Diocese of Toledo, which includes Lima. The Redemptorists, who have been in Lima almost since its founding, are leaving their parish there this year after nearly two centuries, citing aging priests and declining vocations. Mr. Sibert also expressed dismay at the state of the faith among the cradle Catholics he encountered. “A lot of people are just practicing the faith just out of pure habit…. A lot of these areas are really needing someone to lead good catechesis.” Nationwide, the number of Catholic parishes is contracting—a 9 percent decrease between 1970 and 2020, according to Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate—the majority in Black and Latino neighborhoods. And cradle Catholics are departing for other denominations, about eight for every one new Catholic, according to Pew Research. The young adult converts who make the difference in the life of the church might not necessarily be the ones who end up at parishes bursting at the seams with 20-somethings or in metro areas with professional networks, coffee klatches and happy hours just for them. What will happen when these trained and catechized young people arrive in languishing parishes and communities? The success of the “Gen Z revival” may ultimately be judged not by how many bright young things show up to Mass on Sunday or Theology on Tap on Saturday, but whether they transmit their zeal to anyone else.