A glimmer of light in the greyness of our de-Christianised world undermined by nihilism: baptism and Lent are enjoying a revival of interest among young people to whom no one has passed on anything, but who are seeking to rediscover the meaning of the faith they inherited from their fathers. While it is difficult to speak of a sacred springtime, the statistics observed in many French dioceses give us some hope.
In the year of our Lord 2024, every diocese in France is reporting a sharp rise in the number of candidates for baptism. In some regions, such as Brittany, the increase is as high as 50%. In Paris, the increase is 25%. In the Parisian parish of Saint-Roch in the centre of Paris, the vicar, interviewed on TV Libertés, puts forward the figure of 55 catechumens—compared with 4 or 5 five years ago. The average age is 24.5 and 1 in 7 are of Muslim origin.
Most of the future baptised are young adults, and many of them have been recruited via social media. In recent years, Instagram, TikTok, X, or Facebook accounts of religious or priests have proliferated in an attempt to explore new avenues of evangelisation, with some excesses—forgetting that not everything is permitted or possible in terms of evangelisation—but also some great successes. Confinement played a role when thousands of young people found themselves having to fill the emptiness of their existence with a screen as their only companion.
In Rennes, Brittany, the parish priest Nicolas Guillou, interviewed by Europe 1, welcomes this trend but calls for humility: an increase in baptisms, certainly, but when you start from zero or almost zero, it’s easy to show off double-digit growth.
Let’s look at the figures. According to the Catholic periodical L’Homme nouveau, there were 4,278 people asking to be baptised in 2022 and 5,463 last year. There will be almost 7,000 this year, which would represent an increase of 30%—Le Figaro speaks of as many as 12,000! However, these positive figures should be set against the dramatic fall in the number of infant and newborn baptisms over the last twenty years. These statistics can be explained quite easily: the parents of the previous generation did not pass on the faith. So we end up with young people who have lost their way, who have no bearings, and who have to rebuild everything on their own. When these young people come to have children, they don’t dare offer baptism because they haven’t received teaching on faith and baptism. But they can find their way back to the faith by themselves—hence the increase in adult baptisms. The bishops note the significant rejuvenation of catechumens: their average age has fallen from 40 to 30 in just 10 years.
Is this just a passing fad, a way of keeping busy like any other in the interstellar void of our modern lives? There are other factors that need to be taken into account if we are to understand the significance of this trend.
While more and more young people are asking to be baptised, those who are already baptised are finding renewed interest in the rigorous asceticism of Lent, according to a survey conducted by Le Figaro. For a generation drowning in an abundance of material goods and demands, practices of deprivation are increasingly attractive. Asceticism can take a wide variety of forms: in addition to the traditional efforts on the dietary front (fewer sweets, fasting, or light snacks on certain days of the week), some people advocate depriving themselves of the screens that invade their daily lives, or even more demanding mortifications, such as taking a cold shower in the morning. Jean-Marie Guénois, head of Le Figaro‘s Religion section, notes that they dare to use words and expressions that have fallen into disuse, such as the quest for sanctity. He explains this increased intensity by the general climate of hostility that spurs them on:
They appear to be more radical than their elders from the charismatic generation of the 1980s. Realistically, they consider themselves to be in a minority twice over: in a post-Christian society where Catholicism, while not arousing indifference, does arouse contempt and disgust in the wake of the sex scandals; and in a secular society, offended by an Islam that challenges the culture without God through its public practice of Ramadan, in particular.
Today, observing Lent is as much a social and political challenge as it is a religious practice. More and more Europeans can no longer define Lent as anything other than ‘Ramadan for Christians,’ even though the spirit and the letter of these two periods of asceticism have very little in common. The ‘identity’ component—and this is not a dirty word—plays its part in the attraction of Lent, as a 24-year-old engineer told Le Figaro:
We find it natural to restrict our consumer habits, but we’re also struck by cultural uprooting. We’re looking for values, roots, and landmarks.
The vicar of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one of the most prestigious parishes in central Paris, shares this observation: “These young people are not identitarians, but they do need identity.” There’s a kind of saturation in this generation, which is studying or starting out in professional life, with regard to a certain discourse of entrenchment in the generations that preceded it, which killed off any radiance of the faith. They feel a deep and visceral need for civilisational coherence, which is the only way to bring them inner balance and give meaning to their lives, but also to enable them to build a society that is attractive and structuring. They find joy in a concrete Lent that involves simple, demanding, but unequivocal gestures, and show little interest in the abstract logorrhea of a certain catechesis deployed in the 1970s and 1980s, which in the end built nothing and left no lasting traces.
This state of mind, based on a profound search for identity and solid points of reference, is what unites those who, having been baptised, are rediscovering the meaning of Lent and those who are preparing to enter the Church. Father Iborra from the parish of Saint-Roch points out that two-thirds of the young people he has accompanied this year come from broken or blended families. They are looking for a sense of direction, and of the 55 that he will be guiding to baptism, 51 have chosen the traditional liturgy of the Latin Mass, because it responds to their thirst for meaning and their need to know where they are going.
“In a society in flux, the traditional liturgy is clear and unambiguous, and makes an indelible impression on their minds,” explains Abbé Iborra. In the end, this is hardly surprising. Let’s not jump to conclusions, shall we? But let’s simply allow ourselves to be won over by the simple joy that certain truths always triumph and impose themselves with the force of evidence.
