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For three decades, the Catholic community at Stanford averaged 4 adult baptisms a year. This Easter, 46 students and young adults were fully initiated into the Church: 16 were baptized, 10 were received into full communion, and 20 Catholics were confirmed. The total of 46 is up from 14 initiations the year before. Father Bart Hutcherson, the community’s priest, says almost all of this year’s newly baptized adults were Stanford students.
Stanford is part of a broader surge documented by the Catholic prayer app Hallow. It collected data from nearly 60 college and university Catholic ministries. Across those reporting ministries, participation in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, aka OCIA, rose by an average 115%. At Stanford, it tripled.
Stanford’s growth is hardly isolated: Harvard’s OCIA participation doubled, while NYU and USC recorded substantial increases. American culture has long looked to its universities, particularly its elite ones, for a preview of what comes next. Campus rebellions in the 1960s helped reshape national politics and social attitudes. Identity politics, decolonization, and socialist thought later gained adherents at top American universities, left with their graduates, and entered the institutions those graduates eventually led. Based on conversion rates over the last two years, Harvard and Stanford are now experiencing unprecedented growth in their Catholic communities. This growth is found on elite campuses across the country.
This begs the question: why here? Why, at a university in Silicon Valley, of all places, are more students entering a Church that refuses to revise its moral teachings every time the future pushes us further into the black hole of progressivism?
Many would adopt the standard explanation. “Stanford students have burned out.” After years of chasing grades, internships, and influence, they discover that none of it can tell them what they are worth. Religion becomes their coping mechanism. However, that explanation reduces Stanford’s ambition to a frantic chase for credentials. On the East Coast, a student can spend four years announcing his intention to challenge every institution, then dutifully enter the banking/consulting pipeline that has promised him financial security over the next twenty years. He can call himself a heretic all the way to his analyst desk.
The self-proclaimed contrarians in Cambridge keep building horizontally: another firm, another fund, another rung on a ladder. Vertical ambition digs toward first principles. Why does the institution fail? What axiom has everyone accepted because questioning it would require them to sit with their thoughts for more than 5 minutes instead of GPT-6 Astra?
This spirit enlivens founders at Stanford more than at other institutions with similar levels of prestige, intellect, and capital. A student who insists on getting to the bottom of things eventually has to aim that habit towards himself. The same framework that prompts one to ask what makes a product innovative leads to why does casting off an inherited moral limit automatically count as progress?
Here the Catholic Church presents a question that cannot be waved away with another pitch deck or another declaration that society has “moved forward.” What if moral truth is something we discover rather than manufacture? And what if finding it means surrendering the right to decide, whenever obedience becomes inconvenient, that the truth must have changed?
That would be a genuinely radical discovery at Stanford. Not that ambition is bad. Instead, the ambition to reach the foundation of everything will lead you to a foundation you did not build, and to a God who will not be impressed by your GPT wrapper.
In traditional Stanford fashion, begin with the claims that irritate you most. The ones that tickle you in your innermost being. The ones that infuriate you at the very thought of it being true. Ask why the Church thinks it can speak with authority after two thousand years. Ask why confession of sins brings new life. Ask why a Catholic revival is taking place in institutions that appear least likely to produce one.
Stanford has no shortage of students willing to bet their futures on an inkling of a world-changing idea. Forty-six students and young adults took a consequential step into the Catholic Church this Easter. If you pride yourself on following the largest question wherever it leads, you might want to find out what they found.
