The past year has brought genuine reasons for Christian gratitude. In Britain, surveys have registered an unexpected rise in church attendance among young adults, particularly among Catholics. In France, adult baptisms continue to climb steadily. In the United States, Easter vigils in many dioceses reported unusually large numbers of converts, while prominent public figures have spoken openly about their return to Christianity. Elements of the secular press have taken to calling it a “quiet revival,” and for once the phrase does not seem misplaced.
It would be perverse to deny this moment its significance. God does not owe us growth, and when He grants it, the proper response is thanksgiving. Yet it is precisely at such moments that a subtler danger arises: the temptation to confuse conversion with victory, to treat the return of souls to the Church as evidence that Christianity is “winning” again, culturally or politically. That temptation is understandable in an age of prolonged marginalisation, but it is also spiritually perilous.
Augustine warned that the Church’s gravest enemies are not always her external persecutors but her internal distortions. In The City of God, he insists that the earthly city is never simply replaced by the heavenly one within history. The two are intermingled until the end of time, and any attempt to identify visible success with divine favour risks baptising pride. Conversion is not conquest. It is the beginning of a long, often painful, reordering of love.
One reason triumphalism is tempting is that Christianity has spent decades playing defence. Declining numbers, collapsing institutions, and cultural hostility have trained believers to think in terms of loss and recovery. Against that backdrop, any sign of growth can feel like vindication. But the Church is not vindicated by numbers, nor is she justified by her relevance. Benedict XVI repeatedly warned against a Christianity that measures itself by influence rather than fidelity. Writing long before his papacy, he observed that the Church grows not through power but through attraction, and even that attraction must be purified lest it become merely aesthetic or ideological.
This matters because conversion, far from being a moment of strength, is often a moment of exposure. New converts are stripped of old certainties without yet possessing new ones. Social ties may fray, habits are unsettled, and the moral demands of the faith begin to press in earnest. The early fervour that often accompanies conversion can mask a deep fragility. The desert fathers knew this well. Zeal, they taught, is frequently the prelude to temptation rather than maturity.
Recent patterns bear this out. In both the UK and the US, many converts are young, digitally literate, and formed in a culture of immediacy. They often arrive with strong intuitions about beauty, order, and moral seriousness, but little patience for gradual formation. When such converts are immediately elevated as spokesmen or symbols of renewal, the burden placed upon them can be crushing. The Church has seen this before. Public conversions become public apostasies when they are instrumentalised too quickly.
There is also a danger of using converts to settle old scores. In a polarised environment, conversions are easily framed as defections from one cultural camp to another. A former secularist, progressive, or libertine is paraded as proof that a particular political or aesthetic vision of Christianity has triumphed. This is profoundly dangerous. Conversion is not an argument; it is a mystery of grace. To conscript it into culture-war narratives is to misunderstand its nature and to risk deforming the convert’s own spiritual life.
What, then, is required? Above all, formation. Benedict XVI insisted that Christianity is not an idea but an encounter that unfolds over time. The Church must resist the pressure to confuse attraction with discipleship. Liturgy, doctrine, moral discipline, and obedience to ecclesial authority are not accessories to revival; they are its substance. Without them, growth becomes brittle.
Patience is a virtue, not a bureaucratic inconvenience. The Church’s time horizon is longer than electoral cycles or media narratives. History is littered with revivals that burned brightly and vanished quickly because they lacked depth. The instinct must be one of anti-intoxication. It prefers stability to spectacle, fidelity to excitement.
Humility is the necessary companion to patience. A genuine revival does not produce self-confidence but fear of the Lord. It reminds the Church of her responsibility rather than her success. Augustine never tired of warning that the Church remains a corpus permixtum, a mixed body of saints and sinners, always in need of purification. Any revival that forgets this will quickly turn sour.
None of this is an argument for suspicion or restraint in welcoming converts. On the contrary, the Church must open her doors wide. But she must also remember that conversion is a beginning, not a culmination. The task now is not to declare victory but to accompany souls toward holiness, often quietly, slowly, and sometimes without visible reward.
If God is indeed drawing many back to the Church in this moment, it is not because Christianity has become fashionable again or because its enemies have been outflanked. It is because, in a disordered age, the truth still attracts. The Church’s task is not to celebrate that fact as a win, but to receive it as a charge.
