Last year I published a column arguing that the Reformation was over. Indeed, that it had been over for 25 years. It was time for our Protestant friends to come home.

My column expressed a pious hope based on an ecumenical breakthrough at the turn of the millennium that — as Fr. Raymond de Souza noted — has not been matched in the quarter-century since. Of course, I didn’t expect the unity of Western Christianity to be restored any time soon. But given the friendly state of Catholic-Protestant relations in 2024, it was worth a try.

What a difference a year makes. Or perhaps it is not the year that made the difference. Perhaps I am just more aware of certain trends in the online world than I was a year ago. Either way, some recent developments in the Protestant world, vis a vis its relationship to Catholicism, should be taken into consideration on Reformation Day 2025.

A good place to start is with the rise of Allie Beth Stuckey. She’s “The Christian [that is, Evangelical] Podcaster Rallying a New Generation of Conservative Women” according to a recent profile in the Wall Street Journal. I applaud Stuckey’s growing popularity. Here’s why:

Among the ‘Christian stuff’ that Stuckey believes the Bible deems true: There are only two genders, determined at conception, and marriage is between a man and a woman. She also believes abortion is murder and in vitro fertilization, surrogate parenthood and hormonal birth control are wrong, including in marriage.

This may seem obvious to faithful Catholics but there are two reasons why it’s not obvious that Stuckey would say it. First, large chunks of Evangelicalism seem to be on the same path to theological liberalism already traveled by their Mainline forebears. (You can read an account of it from within Evangelicalism here.) Second, even pro-life and pro-traditional marriage Evangelicals are not normally with us on IVF, surrogacy and birth control. For all these reasons, the growing popularity of Allie Beth Stuckey — who stands with us on issues where Evangelicals historically did and even on issues where they didn’t — can only be good news to me.

But not to everyone. When I shared the Journal’s article on Stuckey, I got pushback. Catholics had seen her critiques of our faith and were shocked by them. The recent developments I mentioned above, of which I was unaware a year ago, help explain why.

First, we’re not accustomed to Protestant allies pushing back so vigorously against Catholicism. It’s a recent thing. Or, rather, a return to an old thing. There was a period when big name Evangelicals didn’t do it so much. Now they do it again, a lot. Allie Beth Stuckey, Wesley Huff, Gavin Ortlund and others.

Take it as a backhanded compliment. While Catholicism continues to bleed numbers overall, in elite and online circles many Protestants are converting to Catholicism (or Orthodoxy). This has induced panic among some Protestants. There are books being published to combat it (see here, here, and here) and articles. Thus the uptick in online polemics against Catholicism.

Second, well, it’s in the name of the group founded by Karl Keating: “Catholic Answers.” That is, when I was a kid, Catholics didn’t have, or know, the answers to all the challenges to their faith coming at them from Sola Scriptura Protestants. Now they do. So Protestants had to adjust to hearing actual answers. You see their lackluster response in, for instance, Stuckey’s debate with Catholic convert Lila Rose. Beginning at about the 25—or 26-minute mark in this video, it is Allie for the prosecution and Lila on the hot seat. Lila has an answer for every charge hurled against the Church and Stuckey’s response is to simply not accept those answers. Nevertheless, those answers are readily available now in a way that was less true before Keating re-started the modern Catholic apologetics movement.

Keating, in fact, had an interesting response to my sharing of the article about Stuckey, in which he wrote:

By the way, I don’t have recent information on which way has more traffic, from Catholic to Protestant or from Protestant to Catholic, but my intuition is that the Protestant-to-Catholic way now outnumbers its opposite.

That wasn’t the case in the 1980s, when, in the U.S. alone, about 100,000 Catholics left each year to become Protestant Fundamentalists. (Others left for ‘regular’ Protestantism.) I saw that movement change greatly over the next two decades. Most Catholics who leave the Church today drift into Nothingism rather than into Protestantism.

I think Keating is right. The possibility that Protestant-to-Catholic conversions “now outnumber its opposite” had not occurred to me until Keating wrote it because I work regularly with Evangelicals here in Connecticut, many of whom are former Catholics. But the ex-Catholics are mostly over a certain age, many with similar stories to tell about having found Jesus in the Catholic charismatic movement in the 1970s or ‘80s, followed by their exit from the Church. I know almost no Protestants under a certain age with that sort of background. But I do know an increasing number of young Catholics who used to be Protestant.

Which brings me full circle to last year’s Reformation Day column. I invite our Protestant friends, whom I dearly love, to come home. It looks like some of them already are.

From Peter Wolfgang in Catholic Culture