Mass attendance is up. At my parish, the men under 30 demographic is quickly outpacing the women in the same age bracket and is getting to the point where they seem to outnumber the retired. I see them everywhere: every event, every group, Daily Mass, special liturgies, and Adoration. The majority of catechumens this year were young men. Recent commentary from some bishops in interviews with national journalists has attributed this resurgence to a “bully culture.” This analysis misses the mark.

Bully culture, whatever that means, is neither new nor is it emerging. Was society kinder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Napoleon’s France, Henry’s England, Khan’s Mongolia, the Japanese shogunate, or Caligula’s Rome? Political leadership across time and cultures has always tended towards the mean spirit suggested in these interviews. In comparison, we appear to be living in the kindest civilization ever organized. Mean people on the internet are not the cause for this transformation.

I think this is something much deeper, and much more simple. People have an awareness of how adrift everyone in their social group seems. Wake up, scroll on phone, work, travel, sleep, and repeat. What is the point of that? For more than six decades, young adults been told that relationship is bondage, children are consequence, and adventure is truly living. We can tell ourselves anything for a very long time, but eventually, we’re mugged by reality.

No matter how far we run or where we try to hide, truth is inescapable. We are who we are, no matter how we act or what we choose to believe. Just as there is nothing we can do to reduce our human dignity, there is nothing we can do to change who we were made to be.

In their lives, physical and digital, they watch the lives of their friends who decide to try to separate themselves from their purpose. Purpose is not one’s career or passport stamps, but the cause for which they were made. We are made for others, not for ourselves. They see the pain of people living the lifestyle equivalent of a sovereign citizen: a mistaken belief that they can extract themselves from who they really are and what they actually need.

In response to this, these brave souls who now join us in the pews do the difficult thing: they acknowledge the tug they’ve always felt. They choose to engage in the quest to find that meaning, purpose, and the center of the universe. They find their life when they lay it down; they find their everything at the altar in the Eucharist.

This is an act of incredible moral courage. The courage to reject a counterfeit life, to accept that their life is a gift for others and not built for our amusement. Pope Leo said at the canonization of Carols Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati, the greatest risk in life is to live it outside of God’s plan. The more we participate in that plan, the closer we get to our truest, best version of ourselves.