Catholic life at Yale is experiencing a renaissance. How can it endure?
St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Jeth Fogg
Arts & Culture Editor, The Buckley Beacon
Catholicism has been capturing public discourse as of late.
In February of 2025, Catholic convert and Vice President JD Vance employed the Catholic concept of Ordo Amoris in an attempt to justify the Trump Administration’s suspension of foreign aid programs and nationwide immigration crackdown, to the chagrin of Pope Francis. Mere months later, Chicago native Robert Prevost became the first American Pope, taking the name Leo. And earlier this year, now-Pope Leo XIV published his first Papal Encyclical entitled Magnifica Humanitas, in which he invokes Catholic and non-Catholic thinkers ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien to Hannah Arendt to address the human condition in the age of artificial intelligence. From the application of just war theory to the war in Iran to the spiritual ramifications of AI, Catholic voices have found their way to the mainstream of politics and popular culture.
The same is true at Yale. During the past three years, I have personally witnessed a surge in Catholic life on campus, both within the pews and in the seminar room. Students are encountering the Catholic Church and its intellectual tradition both as a means for understanding the world and deepening their own faith. During last year’s Easter Vigil at St. Thomas More (STM), Yale’s Catholic Chapel and Student Center, 36 people received sacraments— the most ever— from baptism to confirmation and reception of the Eucharist. This fits a broader trend of conversions to Catholicism within campus parishes across the United States.
In a recent article featured in Slate, Yale teaching fellow Sergio Infante highlighted the fact that longtime Professor Carlos Eire’s course on “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition” (CIT) enrolled 85 students, the most out of any Yale History course last semester. In his own article appearing in First Things, Eire agreed that “There is a hunger out there among Gen-Z students for what [his] course has to offer” that he hasn’t seen in 50 years of teaching.
Recent converts to Catholicism who worship at STM cite a host of reasons for their faith commitment, with Eire’s CIT course playing no small part. Christopher Pedro ‘29 fully entered the Catholic Church this past Easter. Pedro likened the campus environment to a “rat race” of careerism, where students scurry along with blinders, all-too-often devoid of sincere human encounter.
In many ways, St. Thomas More is the antidote for the transactional exchanges that Pedro describes. He cited STM’s Undergraduate Men’s Spirituality group and multicultural ministries, which, in his words, seek to embody the best of a Church which “transcends and unites all forms of human culture.” Pedro was drawn to the global diversity of the Church. “You can go to any corner of the world, and you’ll find the Church there,” he told me.
Joshua Blake ‘28, who entered the Church alongside Chris, was recently interviewed by Commonweal about his conversion. An active parishioner at St. Thomas More, Blake claims that “Catholic life at Yale is as vibrant as it could possibly be.” Along with mentioning the particular virtues of STM, Blake referenced his study of the Church’s vast intellectual tradition as a stimulus for his religious devotion. Another recent convert I spoke to called Eire’s CIT course a “contributing factor” to their conversion.
75 years ago, William F. Buckley decried Yale’s institutional departure from Christian principles in God and Man at Yale. Although he would still probably shudder at Yale’s religious climate today, Buckley might betray a smile for the state of his beloved Catholic community.
My own experience as a parishioner at St. Thomas More and devotee to the Catholic intellectual tradition has been thoroughly positive, and testifies to the experiences of many students at Yale. Despite its resounding success, Yale’s curricular engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition is approaching a crossroads. While my own studies of Catholic thought at Yale have been transformative, largely thanks to the mentorship of Professor Carlos Eire, I still harbor some reservations about the future of Catholic intellectual life for Yalies after me. Eire will be on leave during the Spring 2027 semester, and one must wonder what Catholic intellectual life looks like at Yale after his retirement. Who will fill in the void once the most vigilant sentinel of Catholic intellectual life at Yale retires his post?
From Directed Studies, to CIT, to an independent study on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the 20th Century, the more I study the panoply of Catholic thinkers, the more I am persuaded how essential their presence is within the Yale curriculum and adjacent spaces like the Yale Center for Civic Thought. In my conversations with Catholic and even non-Catholic peers, they almost unanimously agree. I echo Professor Eire’s observation that “it is easy to notice the intensity with which students in this class grapple with the reading, regardless of their background… I’ve never felt or seen this kind of intensity in any other course of mine, including those… in which all the students were monks and seminarians.”
If, in the words of Yale’s Mission Statement, we are to “create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching,” then the Yale curriculum must continue to enable spaces for students to contend with the Catholic intellectual tradition. I am not advocating for some kind of Catholic triumphalism in Yale’s curriculum – far from it. Catholic thought should not be perceived as inimical to rigorous scholarship. Rather, an authentic “intellectual pluralism” necessitates a curricular exposure to the truth claims of Catholicism, along with all other religious and philosophical traditions. In keeping with the sentiment of Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell, I have found that excellent, intellectually-serious presentations of the Catholic intellectual tradition are well-received in Yale’s academic spaces – but must remain as such.
I do not claim – to grossly caricature William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale – that the university is orchestrating a coup d’état to overthrow Christianity from its curriculum. My experiences, along with those of many Yalies, tell a much different tale. However, at a moment when public trust in higher education has sunk as low as 36 percent, sustaining an engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition along with the humanities more broadly is a tremendous opportunity not only for generative intellectual exchanges, but also for the university to restore trust in its business of knowledge-production.
Pope Paul VI once suggested in an address to the UN that the Catholic Church is an “expert in humanity.” In both the chapel and the classroom, students are taking this claim seriously. Yale must continue to do the same within its curriculum. The renaissance of Catholic life at Yale has the opportunity to be more than just a transient moment. To whom, then, will Yale pass the baton of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition?