NEW YORK — Last November, Daniel McKenna, a personal trainer known by his social-media handle “The Irish Yank,” shared a video on Instagram of himself leaving Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Greenwich Village.
“We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for an ‘I went to Mass’ post,” McKenna wrote, touting the experience as “one of the best Masses I’ve ever been to in my life.”
The video went viral, with hundreds of his followers commenting and thousands sharing it. A week later, McKenna filed another dispatch. “I went back to Mass,” he reported, “and yes it was another banger.”
McKenna’s enthusiasm captures the spirit of a suddenly resurgent Catholic scene in the heart of Manhattan, where college students and young professionals are showing up in force at Masses and other Catholic events as if they are queuing up for the latest hot restaurant or club.
Much of the fervor is focused on three specific parishes, all of which have seen a spike in Mass attendance and converts to the Catholic faith:
At St. Joseph’s, the Sunday evening Mass is standing-room-only, which hardly dissuades the 150 or so people in the overflow who stood in the church’s narthex on
