Record Easter Converts Credit Catholic Influencers—What the Church Isn't Learning From It

Happy Easter everybody! Resurrexit sicut dixit! May the grace of the risen Lord be with you and your loved ones in abundance on this highest of all holy days.

This Easter has me thinking, believe it or not, about the Second Vatican Council, specifically one aspect —the Council's teaching on the laity. The Council devoted considerable space to its vision of the laity (both constitutions treat of the subject, as well as the decree Apostolicam actuositatem). Whatever kind of ecclesial renewal the Council Fathers were hoping for, they clearly believed the laity were going to have an essential role in it. I do not think it is too much to say the Council believed the Catholic laity would "save" the Church and civilization. This was really the fundamental vision of Vatican II—the Catholic laity, awakening from their centuries of immaturity, coming into their inheritance and taking their rightful place as kings and prophets to sanctify the world for Christ, no longer as passive pawns of the clergy, but agents of evangelization in their own right, taking initiative and pressing the boundaries of the Church ever forward into the brighter tomorrow. 

Obviously the Council's plans for the laity did not unfold how they had hoped. I needn't go into the details; we all know the demographics. In retrospect, the Council's vision of the laity seems not only embarrassingly naive but ridiculously clericalist. While the Church may have preached lay initiative, it practice it demanded  blind obedience to the Conciliar zeitgeist. We're moving to vernacular because this is what the pope wants. Don't question it; just obey. We're ripping out the high altar because this is what the bishop says; shut up and rejoice in your new brutalist sanctuary. We are jettisoning Latin because the Council says we have to; don't like it? Too bad. Submit to the Council. We know best. We possess the vision. We clergy know the mind of the Church.We know what the young people want. Eloquent words of Lumen gentium notwithstanding, the Church's engagement with the laity since Vatican II has simplya continual rehash of pray, pay, and obey.

This came to mind this Easter because of the way the religious leadership at Jesus's time fundamentally misunderstood what the Messiah was and what to expect from Him. They had their texts. They had their commentaries. They had their ideas, their hopes, their grandiose plans for the restoration of Israel. There was a sense of messianic expectation in the air, and no doubt many Jews believed they were on the cusp of a grand national revival. But they fundamentally misunderstood what God was doing. Inflated with an exaggerated sense of their own importance, they could not fathom a future that unfolded other than how they had anticipated. The long-awaited Messiah was far different than what they had expected—and not only did the Messiah's plan differ entirely from their vision, but was in fact predicated upon its failure. The destruction of the Temple, the end of the Old Covenant, and the diaspora of the Jews all served to establish the credibility and promulgation of the Gospel. Blinded by their own hubris, the temple leadership choked off God's grace, making it impossible to see (much less understand) what God was really doing.

This Easter, record numbers of converts were received into the Church the world over. Many dioceses reported the largest crops of adult candidates and catechumens in decades. Praise God! More interesting, however, is that many of these converts, when asked, stated that Catholic digital content creators from the United States were instrumental in their conversion process. This includes mainstream creators like Fr. Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron, but also more Trad and Trad-adjacent influencers like Taylor Marshall, Tim Gordon, Raymond Arroyo, Peter Kwasniewski, and Matt Fradd. More extreme and polarizing figures like Archbishop Vigano and even Nick Fuentes were occasionally cited as influences as well.

This list is interesting for who it includes and who it omits. On the one hand, notably absent from this list are members of the hierarchy speaking in any official capacity: those outreach programs our dioceses spend millions on, the gaudy evangelistic media blitz of the Synod on Synodality, the statements and homilies and texts endlessly churned out of Rome—none of it mattered as much as the opinions of some podcasters whose work is extra-hierarchical (while Barron and Schmitz are members of the clergy, their apostolates exist entirely outside of the hierarchy and are not official expressions of any diocese or ecclesial entity; in other words, their success is not because they are clergy but because they act like laymen).  

On the other hand, the list includes figures who are considered in a negative light by many in the hierarchy. I have no doubt that some names on that list were precisely the figures Pope Francis had in mind when he blasted "backwardists" in the American Catholic society and took a veiled swipe at EWTN, suggested it was doing "the work of the devil." No doubt some of these influencers were in mind when the late pontiff penned his explanatory letter to Traditiones custodes and said that Traditional Catholics "widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church"; some have speculated that Taylor Marshall's pachamama stunt was the catalyst for suppressing the TLM. Not exactly people who are in the good graces of the powers that be! And yet, these same characters—most of them laymen—are cited as the major influences behind this year's historic surge in converts. Like them or not, they have proved effective in a way the institutional Church has not.

Some people who don't know how to take a win have actually lamented this fact; Religion News Service recently did a piece  hand-wringing that these converts may be coming in "not for the right reasons" (by this RNS means they are too based). "Yes, yes we want converts—but nooo not that kind!" There are people out there who would truly rather see the Church fail than have the "wrong kind" of growth.

In returning to the original subject of the laity, I have amused myself with the thought that perhaps the laity may yet save the Church, but just not in the way Vatican II expected. The Jews expected the Messiah to save Israel, and He did, but not at all in the way they expected. We may yet have a situation where the Church is restored by lay initiatives despite the attitude of the Church authorities. That is exactly what happened at the time of Christ's Passion, and if we are suffering through a Passion of the Church, we may see something analogous. Easter is not merely about Resurrection, but about Resurrection that flies in the face of all expectation. It is about fulfillment out of apparent despair, victory from the midst of defeat, life springing from the bosom of death. If the Resurrection is the antitype of our ultimate victory, such a thing would be supremely fitting. God fulfilled the words of the Scriptures in a way the Jews did not anticipate; maybe, in a supreme twist of divine irony, God will fulfill the Council's teaching on the laity in a way the Council Fathers could have never anticipated.

The salvation of the Church may come from the laity, but not in the paternalistic, clericalist terms dictated by Vatican II. In the meantime, whatever y'all are doing is bearing fruit. Keep it up, kings.