By Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner | Photographs by Nick Schnelle for WSJ

FLORISSANT, Mo. -- The Catholic Church is struggling in St. Louis. Two years ago, the archdiocese closed or merged dozens of parishes due to declining attendance and a scarcity of priests.

But just outside town, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, conservative Catholicism is flourishing. Last year, the Augustine Institute, a Catholic seminary that emphasizes a return to the rigors of scripture and tradition, paid around $20 million for a 284-acre campus that Boeing had used as a retreat and executive training center.

Augustine, which was founded in 2005, moved in after outgrowing its space in a Denver office park. It is still in the process of changing the artwork -- from aviation prints that celebrate the miracle of flight to portraits of saints who performed actual miracles.

Its ascendance is part of a broader shift in American Catholicism: While the Church has been in decline for decades, a conservative brand of the faith is staging a resurgence.

"You judge a tree by its fruit," said Timothy Gray, Augustine's president, as he reflected on the institute's growth from his perch in a library lined with carved wooden panels harvested from a 16th-century English monastery.

Across the country, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. Their ranks have been infused with the zeal of young, brainy converts like Vice President JD Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35. Vance spent Easter weekend at the Vatican, where he held a brief meeting with Pope Francis.

While their numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential, say observers -- in the struggle for the Church's future and that of the nation.

The conservatives are more likely to be kneeling in pews on Sunday and managing parish affairs while others stay home. There are echoes of their beliefs in the Trump administration's policies -- most recently, its introduction of sweeping tariffs. And they are building a network of universities and media outlets, like the Augustine Institute, to educate future cadres.

"Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the same path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity," said David Deane, a theologian who gave a recent lecture on Catholicism and the new right. "The seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this."

A landmark 2022 survey of more than 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests carried out by the Catholic Project, a research initiative at Catholic University, confirmed this. Among those ordained since 2020, some 80% identified as "conservative/orthodox." Those identifying as progressives and liberals were facing a "virtual collapse."

"Among priests, it's a massive shift," said Stephen P. White, the Catholic Project's executive director, who views the conservative Catholic renewal as "a piece of the populism that seems to be spreading not just in the United States but over most of the Western world."

The conservatives are bound together by a conviction that liberalism in its many guises -- political, social, theological -- has run aground. While it may have generated material wealth, they say, it has undermined communities and wrought the social "carnage" that President Trump invoked during his first inauguration in 2016.

For the Catholic Church, in particular, they believe that a project to embrace modernity and make itself more appealing to a younger generation instead yielded empty pews and confusion. In its place, they want to build a post-liberal world that is rooted in traditions of the past.

"For a lot of progressives, they think that if the Church could just accommodate the modern world, it will stop its decline," Gray said. "But everywhere the Church has accepted the modern world and its contemporary values, it's died."

Tensions with Pope Francis

Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has swung from the adoption of more liberal principles in the Second Vatican Council to the 35 years of Cold War conservatism espoused by Popes John Paul II and Benedict.

The 2013 appointment of Francis, an Argentine celebrated as the first Pope from "the global south," marked a pivot toward a more pastoral approach that emphasized flexibility and compassion over doctrine. To conservatives' chagrin, he has allowed "blessings" for same-sex couples and has talked about divorce and climate change.

The pope's American critics were largely diplomatic during his recent illness -- but on the fringe some have been more explicit in expressing their desires for a successor. One is Bishop Joseph Strickland, an ardent conservative and Francis opponent, who the Vatican removed two years ago as the Church's leader in Tyler, Texas.

"Certainly, we pray for him," Strickland told Newsmax last month, "but we need the new Pope to be someone who is much clearer -- really, frankly, stronger in the tradition of our Catholic faith."

Francis has expressed his own discontent. In 2023, he complained of a "very strong, organized reactionary attitude" against him in the U.S. Church, adding: "I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless."

Trump's return to power has escalated the feud. In December, he chose his U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican: Brian Burch, a staunch critic of Francis who founded a Wisconsin group called CatholicVote that helped to mobilize support for Trump, entwining MAGA and faith.

Francis, in turn, appointed a liberal cardinal, Robert McElroy, as the Archbishop of Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, the vexed issue of immigration has sparked a tetchy back-and-forth between Vance and the Vatican. Days after his inauguration, the vice president accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of supporting illegal immigration because it allowed them to reap millions of dollars in federal aid -- prompting New York's archbishop, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, to denounce the remarks as "scurrilous."

In February, Pope Francis felt moved to issue an extraordinary letter correcting Vance after the vice president cited a theological argument about "the hierarchies of love" to try to justify the Trump administration's deportation policies. (No, the pope chided Vance in so many words, compassion did not end at the border or hinge on a migrant's legal status.)

The exchanges over immigration continued during Easter weekend. On Good Friday, the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See posted on its social-media account that "the Trump Administration is working to preserve U.S. sovereignty by curbing illegal immigration. We support legal pathways to citizenship."

Francis, in an Easter address that was read by an aide to the crowd in St. Peter's Square, called on "all those in positions of political responsibility" to help the needy, and he lamented violence and conflict in the world. "How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants," his message said.

It's unclear just how much influence American conservatives will wield in a global contest to select a new pope. During his tenure, Francis has stocked the College of Cardinals that will eventually determine his successor with loyalists who share his more liberal outlook.

Still, America is home to the world's fourth-largest Catholic population, and it's a big source of wealth for a Vatican under financial strain.

'Glimpse into heaven'

Whoever occupies the Papal seat after Francis will be shepherding an American flock that is increasingly enamored of practices from an ancient, unreformed Catholicism. The most striking may be the traditional Latin Mass, codified in the late 1500s and practiced into the 1960s, and which Francis has discouraged. In it, the priest keeps his back to worshipers and speaks in Latin -- while in the contemporary Mass that superseded it, the priest faces the congregation and gives the worshipers more opportunities to pray out loud in response.

Among those who have found a sense of mystery and transcendence in the old ways is Michael Knowles, who produces a popular podcast and online videos that offer commentary from a Catholic perspective and are hosted by the MAGA-aligned Daily Wire media company.

"People go to Mass for a glimpse into heaven," said Knowles, whose videos have garnered more than 2.2 million subscribers on YouTube. "If the Mass gets more focused on me, if the music becomes more quotidian and casual, if the sacraments are not treated with due reverence, it teaches in a sometimes imperceptible way that one need not really go."

Brittany Hugoboom, the glamorous editor of Evie, often described as a conservative Cosmopolitan, is a fan of the Latin Mass. So, too, is Megan Mlinarcik, a mother of six in Pittsburgh, who runs a Latin Mass Moms group on Facebook. While mainstream Catholic churches have been in decline for decades, her traditional parish is gaining members, she noted. Its motto: Our future is in our past.

"People would come during Covid and have stayed," she said. The Latin Mass, which bonded Catholics across geography and generations, was a potent draw. "You can go to a Latin Mass anywhere in the world and it will be exactly the same," Mlinarcik explained.

According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, 19% of Americans -- or some 53 million adults -- identify as Catholic. That's down from 24% in 2007. After a decadeslong slide, that decline appears to be leveling off.

A more salient statistic may be church attendance. At least half of Catholics turned up weekly in the 1970s compared with only about a quarter today, according to Ryan Burge, an Eastern Illinois University professor who tracks religious data.

As the generation of Catholic leaders that came of age during the liberal activism of the 1960s and 1970s fades away, their replacements are likely to be conservatives, educated at schools like Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan. That is where the Kansas City Chiefs' kicker Harrison Butker last year delivered a commencement address in which he urged women to embrace their "vocation" as homemakers, creating a national stir.

Long a political bellwether, Catholic voters were virtually split in their choice for president in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of people who voted that year. They broke sharply for Trump in the most recent election, supporting him by an 11 percentage point margin.

Once motivated by the cause of outlawing abortion, conservative Catholics now tend to be animated by a broader MAGA view that liberalism and its elites have jeopardized Western civilization and need to be defeated, said Massimo Faggioli, a historian and theologian at Villanova University. CatholicVote, for example, takes aim not only at gender issues but also immigration and trade, which it blames for harming communities.

"[Their] real project is not to break the Church but is, forgive me, to make Catholicism great again," Faggioli said.

New training grounds

In Denver, Father Michael Nicosia is co-pastor at St. Paul, an ecumenical Catholic church that bills itself as "radically inclusive" and promotes "a different way to be Catholic." The onetime advertising executive had attended seminary in Rochester, N.Y., in the 1990s, then overseen by one of the most progressive bishops in the country. Now, to his dismay, Denver's archdiocese refers to St. Paul's congregants as "so-called" Catholics.

"The danger is the certitude they harbor," Father Nicosia said of those Catholics he calls "retroactive" conservatives.

Their appeal, he argued, was a kind of false nostalgia like that fueling populist political movements across the West. "From my sense, in these times of conflict and cultural change, many people find comfort in an exclusive church that offers absolute, universal answers," he said, adding: "Certitude is attractive but only an illusion."

Denver turns out to be a touchstone for conservative Catholics. Pope John Paul II chose the city as the site of his August 1993 World Youth Day festival, overlooking traditional Catholic bastions like Boston, New York or Chicago. The idea was to seed a new evangelism.

Among those in the audience that day was a 24-year-old Tim Gray, who was then leading a Catholic youth group from Rapid City, S.D., and can still recall the thunder of stamping feet in Mile High Stadium as the pope's helicopter approached. "That was a moment where you thought: This could change things," he recalled.

Gray was accompanied by Charles Chaput, who would go on to become Denver's archbishop and a leading conservative voice in the American Church. Also on hand was Curtis Martin, who would create the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or Focus, an outreach group that has become a Catholic hub on many campuses.

Gray grew up outside Chicago in a family he described as "culturally Catholic" -- that is, going through the motions of the faith but without conviction. It was in high school that he discovered scripture. He studied at Franciscan and then returned to Colorado to help found the Augustine Institute, starting with a single classroom. "We felt like a lot of Catholic institutions had lost the sense of their roots," he explained.

Augustine's graduate school trains new clergy and church leaders, both in person and through remote learning. The institute also produces a wealth of Catholic content -- from school textbooks to slick videos featuring teens talking about how they observe Lent. Much of it is available on Augustine's smartphone apps. Gray -- who studiously avoids politics -- described Augustine's approach as trying to recover the roots of Catholicism to apply to the present.

The idea appealed to Madeline Joerger, 24, who came to Augustine for graduate school after earning her degree in education at Benedictine College. She plans to teach at a Catholic school.

"We have 2,000 years of tradition," Joerger said over lunch in Augustine's dining hall. "We have to have something to say beyond the modern world."

Her classmate James Luppino, 27, saw himself as part of a grassroots reaction to a prevailing culture that many found wanting. "An effect of the modern secular world has been a loss of meaning for a lot of people, " he said.

When the Boeing campus came up for sale, a group of Augustine donors swung into action to come up with the funds. In addition to the facilities installed by Boeing and miles of winding trails, the property features a French-style château built by the estate's original owner, the fur trader-turned-Gilded Age magnate Joseph Desloge. He built a matching grand ballroom to host his daughter's debut.

Augustine has turned it into a sanctuary, where students and staff celebrate Mass. On St. Patrick's Day, dozens gathered for a service led by Abbot Gregory Mohrman, who reminded them that the holiday was about Christ -- not corned beef and Irish culture. As they sang hymns and lined up for communion, the light reflected off the river and streamed in through french doors.

"The way to renew the Church is not to change the Church's teaching to try to be popular," Gray said. "It goes back to what Jesus said: if salt loses its tastiness, it's not good for anything but to be thrown out. I think what's interesting about this new movement is, it's salty."

Write to Joshua Chaffin at joshua.chaffin@wsj.com and Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 20, 2025 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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