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The news is bad. Israel is pounding Gaza, with tens of thousands of deaths. Ukraine is barely holding its own against Russia. China might invade Taiwan. The Antarctic ice sheet might break up. Transgender ideology is spreading everywhere. Birth rates are dropping.

And on and on.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote T.S. Eliot. Perhaps that is why TikTok, Instagram and other social media are turning the minds of Gen Z to glop. Sorry. Once you’re started, it’s hard to stop.

Look closer, though, and you may see green shoots, unnoticed sprigs of good news. They pass unseen by the media, which is too busy chasing fire engines racing to apocalyptic conflagrations.

Overflowing

As someone interested in and occasionally depressed by news about Christianity, and particularly the portion of Christianity to which about 18 percent of the planet and myself subscribes, Catholicism, I was intrigued by this year’s celebrations of the Easter Vigil, a traditional day for baptisms. Not in every church, not in most churches, but in some churches, attendance rose spectacularly, along with the number of baptisms.

It’s hard to know if these really herald a new springtime for Christianity, but the signs are promising. Faith resists statistical analysis, and most churches are incompetent publicists. But consider this. In London, the gigantic Westminster Cathedral (the Catholic one), which has a capacity of 3000 worshippers, had to turn people away on Good Friday because it was full.

One disappointed worshipper, Robert Stephenson-Padron, then walked to the historic church of St James in Spanish Place to discover that it, too, was full. “Friedrich Nietzsche is dead. King Christ the Crucified and His holy Catholic Church are alive and well!” he tweeted, referring to the German philosopher’s famous dictum, “God is dead”.

More significantly, baptisms appear to have increased as well. In the Archdiocese of Southwark in the United Kingdom, 450 adults became Catholics, the highest number of conversions in a decade.

Moving across the pond, in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, 2,075 were baptised into the Catholic faith, the largest number since at least 2016. Another 1,521 people who had already been baptised as Christians were received into the Catholic church, also a record number. In the nearby Archdiocese of San Diego, nearly 1,300 people entered the Catholic Church. In Newark, the largest number in a decade became Catholics.

Surprisingly, in the diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Catholics are a very small minority, 1,104 people became Catholic. And in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, Georgia, that figure was about 2,500.

The buzz on social media was that the wife of the controversial Jordan Peterson had become a Catholic at the Easter Vigil in Toronto. Even more newsworthy was the conversion of Bree Solstad, who had worked for a decade as a porn star and producer. She announced her plans on X (formerly Twitter) in January: “I have decided to quit sex work. To repent of my innumerable sins. To give up my life of sin, wealth, vice and vain self-obsession.”

Back across the Atlantic, in France, comes the surprising news that there has been a sharp uptick in a single year. The number of adult baptisms rose by 30 percent, from 5,463 in 2023 to 7,135 in 2024. This figure did not include the 5,000 teenagers who became Catholic, so the total was about 12,000. This is the largest number in 20 years. In one rural diocese, the numbers rose 200 percent in one year – admittedly, from a low base – 8 to 27.

What does all this prove?

Well, it proves nothing, but it suggests a great deal.

Divine Mercy

The Catholic Church has had terrible press over the past 25 years, especially over sexual abuse scandals. Nearly every country with a large Catholic population has discovered that some priests have been sexual predators. The media has amplified the scandals. Catholics in France are still reeling from a report published in 2021, which claimed that 216,000 children — mostly boys, had been abused. These figures were inflated, but the reputational damage was severe.

The media delights in highlighting other issues: declining numbers of priests and nuns, financial scandals in the Vatican, the Pope’s media gaffes, dissident cardinals…

And yet, and yet … Thousands of French, British and Americans have decided that the Catholic Church is their spiritual home. From a media point of view, this is inexplicable.

These Easter conversions suggest that beneath the pollution and the rubble, Christianity is stirring. People are looking for the transcendence, forgiveness and unselfish fellowship that are missing at a gay Mardi Gras. Perhaps we are at the inflection point of that hockey stick they use in graphs of climate change.

“But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound,” says St Paul. Or, in the words of the former porn star, “God’s forgiveness and mercy is real. If someone as broken and sinful as me can be redeemed and converted, there is no doubt anyone … can also be saved by His divine mercy.”

Despite the stumbles and moral collapse of a few, people see that God is at work in the hidden and self-sacrificing efforts of clergy and lay people. They see that life without God is meaningless and leads to appalling violations of human dignity. They’re tired of paddling in puddles of boredom and welcome a rudder and a stiff sea breeze into the future.

Could it also be a symptom of a change across Western culture? Perhaps. Venture capitalist Santiago Pliego told Tucker Carlson the other day that he had detected a “vibe shift”. Green shoots of all kinds are breaking through the ashes of woke bonfires. He sees them in business, family life, technology, politics, and culture.

The old ways of cutting and slicing the world have broken down, and now the most unexpected groups have found themselves as co-belligerents in an existential war to preserve our ability to speak, compute, build, worship, transact, and live in peace.

And thus — cutting across communities and denominations and occupations and hobbies — we get to the Vibe Shift:

Pliego’s essay on Substack is a breath of fresh air for anyone who feels that the news is bad:

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact-Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.

A similar dynamic is at work in the religious sphere — and that ultimately is the most important of all. People who are sick of materialism are asking themselves if life has anything more to offer than getting rich, getting laid, and getting buried. The answer is: yes, it does. Ask Bree Solstad.

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Originally published at Mercator. Photo by rovenimages.com.