About
By Samuel Trizuljak
This year is special for American Catholics in two ways. First, there's the upcoming 250th birthday of the American Republic on July 4, 2026. But there's another anniversary to celebrate. Today is the first anniversary of the election of Leo XIV, the first pope to hail from the United States.
I'm from Bratislava, Slovakia, and have long had a keen interest in all things American Catholic. I find myself thinking a lot recently about the role that American Catholicism plays not only inside the United States, but across the world.
In particular, I recall Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and his 1987 book The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. While that ambitious volume is concerned with the Catholic Church at large, the book captured a special moment in the life of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Neuhaus argued that, by the late 20th century, American Catholicism had matured. No longer a marginalized immigrant faith, it had institutional depth (schools, universities, media), intellectual firepower (theologians, philosophers) and growing cultural legitimacy. This created a rare "moment" where Catholic thought could step into the public as a serious moral framework for society.
Whether and how fully that opportunity was seized can be debated. My sense is that, despite many challenges, Catholicism has played a transformative role in recent American history and is far from finished. And my larger contention is that 2026 marks the American moment in the history of the Catholic Church.
I have been traveling a lot across Europe in the past several years. I got my first degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and recently a doctorate in Prague. I have been teaching undergraduates in Budapest, Krakow, and Bratislava. I attended a dozen conferences and summer schools for Catholic students and young professionals across Central and Western Europe.
I have a pretty good grasp of the up-and-coming generation of European Catholics. And I can tell you: Where there is life, where there are vibrant, engaged groups of young Catholics – they are, as a rule, plugged into contemporary American Catholicism.
One telling example: I recently gave a course on the history of modern Slovak Catholicism. At the end, when it came to evaluating the heroes and villains of that history, the class was united in relatively uniform evaluation of figures from the 20th century. But when we spoke of the present, views diverged widely. In short, the only thing that the class was able to agree on was that there's now much chaos in Slovakia, and indeed across Europe, regarding how one's Catholic faith is to translate into a coherent vision of public or political engagement. There is no one to look up to.
But one participant raised her hand and said: "Well, the one thing I'd recommend to everyone to sift through this chaos is the American podcast 'Pints with Aquinas,' featuring Fr Gregory Pine OP and Matt Fradd."
I see this frequently everywhere I go across Europe among millennials and Gen-Z: conversions induced by listening to Bishop Barron's sermons; or transformative experiences of Great Books programmes inspired by the revival of classical education in the US; engaged couples preparing for the wedding day by reading Christopher West, Jason Evert or the von Hildebrands; (who were male groups doing the Exodus 90 Lenten spiritual program for the third or fourth year in a row), and increasingly, everywhere, subscribers to the world's most popular and thoroughly Catholic prayer app, Hallow.
In the circles of Catholic staffers and policy wonks in Brussels and on the national level, it is hard to avoid alumni of Arete Academy, the leading international training programme of Alliance Defending Freedom, which, of course, is a joint effort by Christians of various denominations, but which has earned its status thanks to the longtime leadership of its founding CEO Alan Sears, an American convert to Catholicism.
This American m...
This year is special for American Catholics in two ways. First, there's the upcoming 250th birthday of the American Republic on July 4, 2026. But there's another anniversary to celebrate. Today is the first anniversary of the election of Leo XIV, the first pope to hail from the United States.
I'm from Bratislava, Slovakia, and have long had a keen interest in all things American Catholic. I find myself thinking a lot recently about the role that American Catholicism plays not only inside the United States, but across the world.
In particular, I recall Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and his 1987 book The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. While that ambitious volume is concerned with the Catholic Church at large, the book captured a special moment in the life of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Neuhaus argued that, by the late 20th century, American Catholicism had matured. No longer a marginalized immigrant faith, it had institutional depth (schools, universities, media), intellectual firepower (theologians, philosophers) and growing cultural legitimacy. This created a rare "moment" where Catholic thought could step into the public as a serious moral framework for society.
Whether and how fully that opportunity was seized can be debated. My sense is that, despite many challenges, Catholicism has played a transformative role in recent American history and is far from finished. And my larger contention is that 2026 marks the American moment in the history of the Catholic Church.
I have been traveling a lot across Europe in the past several years. I got my first degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and recently a doctorate in Prague. I have been teaching undergraduates in Budapest, Krakow, and Bratislava. I attended a dozen conferences and summer schools for Catholic students and young professionals across Central and Western Europe.
I have a pretty good grasp of the up-and-coming generation of European Catholics. And I can tell you: Where there is life, where there are vibrant, engaged groups of young Catholics – they are, as a rule, plugged into contemporary American Catholicism.
One telling example: I recently gave a course on the history of modern Slovak Catholicism. At the end, when it came to evaluating the heroes and villains of that history, the class was united in relatively uniform evaluation of figures from the 20th century. But when we spoke of the present, views diverged widely. In short, the only thing that the class was able to agree on was that there's now much chaos in Slovakia, and indeed across Europe, regarding how one's Catholic faith is to translate into a coherent vision of public or political engagement. There is no one to look up to.
But one participant raised her hand and said: "Well, the one thing I'd recommend to everyone to sift through this chaos is the American podcast 'Pints with Aquinas,' featuring Fr Gregory Pine OP and Matt Fradd."
I see this frequently everywhere I go across Europe among millennials and Gen-Z: conversions induced by listening to Bishop Barron's sermons; or transformative experiences of Great Books programmes inspired by the revival of classical education in the US; engaged couples preparing for the wedding day by reading Christopher West, Jason Evert or the von Hildebrands; (who were male groups doing the Exodus 90 Lenten spiritual program for the third or fourth year in a row), and increasingly, everywhere, subscribers to the world's most popular and thoroughly Catholic prayer app, Hallow.
In the circles of Catholic staffers and policy wonks in Brussels and on the national level, it is hard to avoid alumni of Arete Academy, the leading international training programme of Alliance Defending Freedom, which, of course, is a joint effort by Christians of various denominations, but which has earned its status thanks to the longtime leadership of its founding CEO Alan Sears, an American convert to Catholicism.
This American m...