One of the things about writing a newsletter is that the news seldom stays put.

When I finished my piece on Notre Dame, I was convinced that Fr. Dowd would soon see the light, gird his loins, and rescind the appointment of a pro-abortion director of its Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Indeed, I feared that much of what I had written would turn out to have been far too critical. But by the time I was nearly finished writing this edition of the Fourth Watch, it seemed that Notre Dame’s leadership was standing firm against all faith-filled protests, including those good bishops who joined with Bishop Rhoades to condemn the action, past recipients of the Evangelium Vitae Award, a number of professors who have severed ties to the Institute, a February 24th prayer service on campus with Bishop Rhoades, and, a student-led “March on the Dome” planned for February 27.

Well, all that pressure, which likely included trustees and major donors, had effect. On February 26, Mary Gallagher, dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs, sent an email announcing that Ostermann “has decided not to move forward as director.” There was no mention of the controversy surrounding the appointment.

This is a happy result and yet more evidence that many good things are happening at America’s most prestigious Catholic university. It does not, however, change the fact that the appointment was made by the institution, and that it was the appointee herself who turned it down. Perhaps she was pushed; I do not know. In any case, there is, at this point, no reason to believe that apart from the efforts of the students and Bishop Rhoades, an abortion advocate would be the director of the Liu Institute. What are we to make of all this?

Some find in the conflict a welcome expression of James Joyce’s description of Catholicism as “here comes everybody.” Cathleen Kaveny and Robin Darling Young, former professors at Notre Dame, dredge up that old trope to criticize Christian Smith’s “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame.” They fault Smith and critics of Ostermann’s appointment for failing to appreciate the profoundly Catholic mixture of the sacred and profane on campus. Smith’s flouted expectations of his former school can be explained by vestiges of his youthful Protestantism, for which Christianity must be pure, and a failure to embrace Catholicism’s “capacious and compassionate intellectual vision.”

Apart from the ignorant and gratuitous insult of a major branch of Christianity, our authors are being less than honest about the limits of their “Catholic” inclusivity. They know, and we know, that there are numerous views that, if known to be held by someone appointed to a prestigious position in the university, would elicit their own howls of protest. The public support of abortion is just not one of them.

What Kaveny and Darling leave implied, a recent essay in the National Catholic Reporter article makes explicit. Karen E. Park faults Bishop Rhoades for not engaging Ostermann in respectful dialogue on whether or not abortion is a good thing. Ugh. That is not a bishop’s job. Providing arguments that the killing of the unborn is contrary to authentic human development is, however, proper to the faculty of a Catholic college or university. For an example of how this is done, see the response to Ostermann’s advocacy of abortion by the always excellent Daniel Philpott of Notre Dame.

I shall, of course, continue to pray for Fr. Dowd, just as I do for my many friends at Notre Dame who do excellent, Church-building work there, undeterred by the vicissitudes of its leadership. It is very possible that this whole mess might lead to a reconsideration of how high-level appointments are made and who should be making them. I am also grateful for the courage and tenacity of Bishop Rhoades.

For all that, however, I must admit that I cannot stop thinking of the fact that there were students willing to stand up for the most vulnerable against the most powerful. They devoted time and energy to press Notre Dame to live up to its stated commitment of “upholding the inherent dignity of the human person and the sanctity of life at every stage is unwavering.” It can’t have been easy to do. While the pro-life cause is clearly alive and well at Notre Dame, I doubt it gets the active support of the majority of either the faculty or the student body. Thus, those students were not only up against many of their classmates, but a priest-president, who I assume they otherwise revere. It must have meant the world to them that they had a bishop walking the same path.

One of the lessons of this debacle, therefore, is that something good is happening with our young people with respect to the Church. One reads story after story of campus ministries recording significant increases in Mass attendance and students in OCIA. Despite these stories, we are assured by Ryan Burge, who is quickly becoming the go-to guy for the numbers on American religion, that it is not a “surge” of faith but rather a plateauing of secularization.

The downward slide into unbelief that has been happening since the 1960s and picked up serious steam in the 1990s has leveled off, according to Pew Research. For those interested in the details, read Burges’ excellent Substack or his handy book The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends and the Future.  In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, Burge sums up his view of the matter:

I have little doubt that this is accurate as far as it goes, but it also buries the headline. The new stasis is the result of some Americans, disproportionately those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, deciding to go against cultural trends to embrace faith. One can’t climb without first pulling out of the nosedive. As that pretty bad song beloved by youth groups in the 1970s, Pass it On, puts it: “It only takes a spark to get a fire going.”

The New Atheists, who seemed so dominant in the wake of 9/11, have faded into virtual insignificance. Whatever they were selling has lost its saliency. Rather, something has happened to push (or pull) Gen Z and Millennials toward traditional Christianity. If we are to follow Vatican II’s command to read “the signs of the times,” we are bound to try to figure out what that something is. Burge views the plateauing as distinctively American, a bedrock of religiosity that other Western cultures lack. That seems right enough, but it cannot explain what is occurring elsewhere, especially in France.

For good news, and I am regularly reminded by my friends that I promised the Fourth Watch would convey some, it is hard to do better than the stirrings of a revival of Catholicism presently happening in France. For folks of a certain vintage, used to stories about the Church’s “Eldest Daughter” losing the faith, this comes as quite a shock. If anything seemed settled, it was that Catholic France was no more.

And to be sure, the overall picture is mighty bleak. A few numbers:

What all this amounts to is that France has become a strongly secular society over the last fifty years. There has been an acceleration of this trend over the past twenty years, which is commonly attributed to revelations of clerical sexual abuse. The sex abuse crisis, which is described in grisly detail in the so-called Sauvé Report, hit France pretty hard, tossing off those who were just hanging on. There were good reasons to believe that the Church was down for the count.

Yet, something happened.

Starting around 2020, the number of inquiries for baptism started going up and rapidly. In 2025, for example, more than 17,800 catechumens were baptized during the Easter Vigil, 10,384 adults and more than 7,400 young people ages eleven to seventeen. This is a remarkable 45 percent increase from the prior year, which itself was a strong one. This rise in religious interest among the young was evident in record attendance at Ash Wednesday services this year. Indeed, the interest was such that last year Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris restarted its Lenten series of lectures made famous by Blessed Frédéric Ozanam (1813–53).  Pope Leo XIV noted the general trend in his Ash Wednesday homily at Santa Sabina last week and attributed it to a desire for sin be recognized and accounted for: 

The pope is not alone in seeking answers for the revival of interest in religion among the young.

One of the more edifying aspects of the French story is the seriousness with which Church officials and thinkers are taking this upsurge, which seems to involve every diocese in the country. There is a sobriety and theological depth at work that the American Church would do well to learn from. At the bureaucratic level, the Archdiocese of Paris has set up a special council to handle the unexpected influx of catechumens, a model that is being copied elsewhere. The goal is to make long-term Catholics, and that will require ensuring that parishes are prepared to absorb and, when needed, be transformed by the newcomers.

Part of figuring out how best to do this well is to understand the reasons young people are coming to a Church that was rarely part of their parents’ lives and about which they have certainly heard many bad things from friends and those who dominate French culture. Antoine Pasquier, news editor of the Catholic weekly Famille Chrétienne, who has written a book on the topic, states that while each path is unique, all involve “a genuine spiritual quest:”

Pasquier sees little evidence of a “radical conversion experience” among those who come to the Catholic Church. (It is worth adding that French Pentecostalism is also growing.) Rather, it often begins with an experience of going to Church for a baptism or a funeral of a grandparent, who might have been the sole believer in the family, and the discovery of a place of solidity in a liquid world.  

Pasquier and others note that the next step is often the internet, seeking more information on religion and, ultimately, Catholicism:

One of these influencers, twenty-nine-year-old Sr. Albertine Debacker of the Chemin Neuf French Community, agrees that young people are looking for guidance in a volatile world.  The Church’s long history holds particular attraction. “They are looking for reliable support, something solid on which to build the foundations of their lives, and they trust the church to provide that.” This explains why Lent holds such fascination. It is both ancient and highly structured. It is also both tactile and communal. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that many of the young are drawn to traditional expressions of Catholicism, such as the extraordinary form of the Mass.

How the French bishops will handle this turn of good fortune remains to be seen. What is clearer is that the new Catholics heading to Notre Dame de Paris share much with the Notre Dame students marching to their own dome in South Bend. (The students still marched, no longer as protest, but as “a prayerful procession in gratitude for the recent decision of the withdrawal of Professor Susan Ostermann.”)

Both expect (and like) that at times being a committed Catholic means standing courageously against the wider culture. That means they will expect leaders of the Church to do so as well. I know very little of the state of the French episcopacy, but one can only hope that it has bishops like Rhoades.