Mass at Arizona State University’s Newman Center chapel. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Father Bill Clements, director of ASU Newman Center
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Dec 15, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Several college campuses across the country are witnessing a notable rise in baptisms and confirmations among students. Catholic evangelists tell CNA that this growth reflects a deepening desire among young adults for certainty, stability, and faith amid today’s turbulent cultural landscape.
For example, at Arizona State University, the Newman Center is experiencing its largest group of students entering the Church. Ryan Ayala, a former seminarian and campus minister who has served at ASU for three years, oversees the evangelization efforts.
“This past semester, we welcomed 52 students into the Church at Christ the King Parish” in Mesa, Ayala said. “And we are expecting 50 more for the Easter Vigil this spring.” According to Ayala, this year marked a record number of students received into the Catholic Church at ASU.
Each year, ASU’s campus ministry prepares students for baptism, confirmation, and full communion through a fall vigil held in collaboration with Christ the King Parish. Students enter the Church from a wide range of backgrounds: Some encounter Christianity for the first time, others come from Protestant communities, and still others are baptized Catholics preparing to complete their sacraments.
This year’s group included eight catechumens who were baptized, 26 Christians who made affirmations of faith, and a significant number of Catholics who received confirmation. The ceremony took place on the feast of Christ the King, Nov. 23.
Ayala attributes the growth in part to simple, consistent outreach. “No phone call goes unanswered,” he said. Students come from Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and nondenominational evangelical backgrounds. Those not yet baptized often come from nonreligious homes, and two identified as atheists. One Muslim student is expected to join the program in January. ASU enrolls approximately 200,000 students.
Overall, participation in ASU’s OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults) program has more than doubled. “This is by far the biggest class we’ve had,” Ayala said.
Supporting this expansion are missionaries from the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), who lead Bible studies and accompany students in their growing faith. Ayala supervises the missionaries and has completed FOCUS formation himself. The Newman Center offers a focused nine-week OCIA process — shorter than the traditional yearlong program — requiring weekly sessions alongside FOCUS Bible studies.
Reflecting on the surge of interest, Ayala sees both cultural and pastoral dynamics at work. “Two things are going on in this surge. There’s a trend in Gen Z. They are asking deeper, philosophical, and theological questions. Some students were shaken up by the shooting of Charlie Kirk. The other thing is simply responding to emails. I ask my staff to be diligent to inquirers. The most important thing is to respond and give them clarity about how to become Catholic.”
“Our main strategy is to have an urgency to respond to them,” he added. “It was so moving to see all those students from other faith traditions stand up and make the commitment to become Catholic.”
Ayala also noted the role of Catholic media, highlighting one student influenced by Father Mike Schmitz’s online ministry. He further praised the spiritual guidance of Father Bill Clements, who leads the Newman Center. “He does a great job humanizing the priesthood but also removing a lot of the anxieties that newcomers to the faith may have.”
Clements, who has directed the Newman Center for 15 years, reports that about 400 students participate in weekly FOCUS Bible studies, and approximately 1,500 attend one of the six weekend Masses. He said he has seen a clear shift in the past two years.
“In the last two years, a switch was flipped. I think people are tired of crazy. They’re hungry for some direction, truth, goodness, and beauty. We have one of the most beautiful Newman chapels in the country,” he said, “and that has been a huge attraction.”
To meet the growing demand, Clements expanded the OCIA schedule. “I revamped the OCIA process here. When people would hit me up at this time of year, I would have to tell them that we start that in the fall. But I couldn’t stand making people wait. So now I have three sessions: fall, spring, and summer.”
He credited FOCUS missionaries for their close accompaniment of students. “They appeal to students. It affords students a chance to connect with other Catholics, and it’s been instrumental in reviving interest in the Church. The missionaries work hard,” he said.
One student, Yailen Cho, received baptism and confirmation on Nov. 23 at the ASU Newman Chapel. She told CNA: “I didn’t grow up very religious at all. My dad became Catholic two years ago, but I didn’t have any religious background.”
Cho now regularly attends Mass and says the FOCUS program helped deepen her reading of the Gospels. Reflecting on her journey, she shared: “I’d had a prayer relationship with God for a while, and I had prayed that my heart would be softened towards God.”
After wrestling with questions of faith, she reached out to the Newman Center, which she said she found “very warm and welcoming.”
Directing a message to others considering the Catholic faith, she said: “I want everyone to be happy, and I want to be happy. If you live by the Word, as the Bible says, you can be happy in heaven forever.”
Meanwhile, in Michigan and Nebraska
Similar momentum is evident at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Rita Zyber, OCIA coordinator at St. Mary Student Parish, said 50 students are currently preparing to enter the Church. Last Easter, 30 students were received, compared with about 20 in 2024.
With daily liturgies and seven weekend Masses, the parish remains consistently full. One Mass was added this year to accommodate greater attendance. “They are packed,” Zyber said.
Reflecting on the increase, she noted: “There is so much chaos in the world. They are looking for structure, stability, and some grounding in God.”
The parish is staffed by Jesuit priests whose Ignatian spirituality resonates strongly with students, Zyber said. She added that other campus and parish OCIA programs across Michigan are seeing similar growth.
In a report last month in the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, Father Ryan Kaup, pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Church and Newman Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, characterized the current situation as “a golden age of campus ministry.”
Kaup reported that this past spring, 72 converts entered the Church at the Easter Vigil. So far this semester, they already have 125 students interested in joining the Church, he said.
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null / Credit: Daniel Jedzura/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Nov 17, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Slightly over 10 years after it redefined marriage to include same-sex couples, the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 10 declined to revisit that controversial decision, upholding at least for now its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that made “gay marriage” the law of the land.A decade after that ruling, nearly a million same-sex couples in the U.S. are participating in what the law now defines as marriage. Yet the Catholic Church has continued to affirm the definition of marriage as being exclusively a union between a man and a woman. That has been the prevailing definition of marriage around the world for at least about 5,000 years of human history, though many societies have allowed polygamy, or multiple spouses, in various forms. The same-sex variant of marriage, meanwhile, only became accepted in recent decades. The Church has held since its beginning that marriage is strictly between one man and one woman. The Catechism of the Catholic Church directs that marriage occurs when “a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life.” It is “by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”Church Fathers and theologians from the earliest days of Catholicism have consistently upheld that marriage is meant to be a lifelong, permanent union between one man and one woman, with St. Augustine explicitly naming “offspring” as one of the blessings of marriage, along with “fidelity” and “the sacramental bond.”Gay marriage a ‘misnomer’ by Church teachingJohn Grabowski, a professor of moral theology at The Catholic University of America, told CNA that marriage in the Catholic Church’s teaching is based on “unity, indissolubility, and [is ordered] toward life,” or the begetting of children.“Those criteria can only be met in a union between a man and a woman,” he said. “They cannot be met in a union between two men and two women. ‘Gay marriage’ is thus a misnomer in the Church’s understanding.”The Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage, Grabowski argued, was an act of “judicial fiat” rather than a recognition of what marriage actually is. He said the high court was functioning more as a “cultural barometer” reflecting an erroneous shift in perception on what marriage is.“It would be similar to if the court passed a rule saying we could call a square a circle,” he said. “It’s just not based on the reality of the natural world.”The Obergefell ruling came after years of LGBT activist efforts to redefine marriage both within individual states and at the federal level. Advocates had argued that there was no meaningful reason to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples and that to do so constituted discrimination. Many critics have claimed that the Church’s broader teaching on marriage actually left the door open for same-sex couples to marry — for instance, they argued, by allowing opposite-sex couples to marry even if one or both of the spouses are infertile, the Church implicitly divorces biological childbearing from marriage itself. Grabowski acknowledged that the Church does allow infertile couples to get married (and to stay married if infertility occurs at a later date). But he pointed out that the Church does in fact prohibit marriage for those who are impotent, or constitutionally incapable of intercourse. The key point for the Church, he said, is what St. John Paul II called the “spousal meaning of the body.” The late pope argued that men and women “exist in the relationship of the reciprocal gift of self,” ordered to the communion of “one flesh” of which the Bible speaks in Genesis. The Church’s teaching, Grabowski said, “is based on the natural law. It tells us that the way God designed us is for the good of our flourishing, both as individuals and as the good of society.”Though marriage advocates have continued to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision over the past decade, others have at times suggested a pivot away from directly challenging it at the legal level. In 2017, for instance, Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron affirmed his opposition to gay marriage but questioned “the prudence and wisdom” of attempting to legislatively outlaw it at that time. The bishop suggested instead that “personal witness and education” were better tools for the current political climate.Grabowski acknowledged that one “could say, realistically, the ship has sailed and the political question is dead.”“But that’s a political judgment,” he said. Catholics should not lose sight of the goal to reestablish correct laws on marriage, he argued.“In terms of something to hope for, pray for, and to the degree that we’re able to, work for it — that’s something Catholics should aspire to.”](http://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cna-explains-why-does-the-catholic-church-prohibit-gay-marriage-catholic-null-credit-daniel-jedzura-shutterstockcna-staff-nov-17-2025-0600-am-cna-slightly-over-10.webp)
