SOUTH BOSTON — On a Wednesday night, more than a hundred adults, mostly in their 20s, sat on metal folding chairs listening to a priest give a short talk about the Eucharist. 

The audience was split fairly evenly between men and women. No cellphones were in view. A handful of attendees drank some of the adult beverages on hand. But most just watched, apparently attentive. 

As he described the Bread of Life discourse in Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, during which Jesus tells a large group of listeners that he plans to give them his Body and Blood to eat, Father Peter Schirripa, 33, noted that most people listening to Christ didn’t like what they heard, adding that they stopped following Jesus over it and that Jesus didn’t try to win them over by making the teaching more palatable. 

“Our Lord is not interested in kind of watering this down, right? If he was concerned that it was too hard for people to understand, he would have changed what he was saying. He would have said, ‘Come back; I didn’t really mean that,’” Father Schirripa said. “But he was willing to lose followers over the True Presence of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Eucharist, which he would institute.

”During his weekly talks for Southie Totus Tuus (the name of the young adult group), Father Schirripa calmly and confidently describes Church teachings in depth on an adult level, including, at times, uncomfortable moral topics such as abortion, contraception, homosexuality, gender identity and nonmarital sex. 

His young-adult peers are listening. But they weren’t always this many. And they weren’t always this tuned in. 

In February 2023, instead of giving up something for Lent, Lindsey Hoggins decided to start going to a weekly young-adults group in the basement of a Catholic church near where she lives in South Boston. 

Awkward, uncomfortable, unfocused and small, the sessions felt like penance. 

“I always say it was 10 people on a good day,” Hoggins said. 

In June of that year,  Father Schirripa, who had just become parochial vicar at the two-church parish (Gate of Heaven and St. Brigid of Kildare), added Eucharistic adoration every week (instead of every other week, as previously), with opportunity for confession, a structured talk on a specific Catholic teaching, and pilgrimages and retreats, among other things. Attendance began to grow. 

In January 2025, the group drew about 40 young Catholics. In August 2025, attendance reached about 100.  

“And now, we have 200 people showing up on a Wednesday, which is crazy,” Hoggins, 27, who works for a private equity firm and grew up about 45 minutes northwest of the city, told the Register. (Some recent meetings have drawn as many as 240, organizers say.)

The growth has taken place largely on a one-to-one basis, because Father Schirripa won’t use social media to spread the word, preferring to keep the group as local as possible. 

“People bring their roommates. Their roommates bring their friends. You know, just as the apostles did it,” said Tim Smyth Jr., 26, a second-year student at New England School of Law who grew up attending St. Brigid’s. 

Planting Seeds 

In recent decades, Southie, as the 2.5-square-mile section of Boston is known, has become to outsiders the city’s best-known neighborhood because of major motion pictures set there that typically feature some combination of crime, gangs, family, loyalty, Boston accents and Irishness. 

The movies mostly depict Southie as it was a generation or two ago — proudly ethnic, hardscrabble, on the rundown side, with large blue-collar families clustered around the neighborhood’s seven Catholic churches and a chapel near the harbor. 

While the core of that community still exists, today’s South Boston features young urban professionals living in high-priced renovated houses and new high-rise luxury apartment buildings drawn by the neighborhood’s closeness to the city’s Financial District where many of them work. It’s so young-adult-centered that even with a population of 38,000, come June 2026, Southie will have zero high schools.

In other words, the trend in South Boston is toward single young adults and away from couples with children — which in most of America means away from churchgoers and toward people who have left church behind. 

A 2023-2024 Pew Research study, for instance, found that only about 14% of people ages 18 to 29 identify as Catholics, which is lower than for other age ranges. In December 2025, Pew Research reported that far more Catholics ages 18 to 24 leave the Church (12%) than enter it (1%). Young-adult Catholics typically attend Mass less frequently than teenagers and older adults. 

And yet since the young-adult group at Gate of Heaven started growing, members say they see noticeably more young people at Sunday Mass — and the 7 a.m. daily Mass at St. Brigid is about evenly split between longtime members of the parish and younger newcomers. 

So what is going on in South Boston? 

‘Yearning for the Truth’ 

Several members of the group told the Register that they appreciate Father Schirripa’s forthrightness. 

“He gives it to you straight,” said John Donnelly, 26, a construction project manager originally from Connecticut. “He doesn’t beat around the bush, yet he does it in a very compassionate way.” 

“What I’ve seen, is that young people have a yearning for the truth,” Donnelly said. 

Hoggins told the Register she and other lay organizers of the group thought people would stop coming once Father Schirripa addressed unpopular Church teachings, but the opposite happened. 

“He speaks the truth, and I don’t think a lot of people speak the truth anymore,” Hoggins said. “A lot of people, especially in South Boston, have never heard the truth before. It can be shocking and daunting. But I think it’s what people need to hear.” 

Smyth said he tells his friends that their salvation will not be found pursuing pleasure in a well-known bar elsewhere in South Boston. 

“It’s so empty,” Smyth said. “Our group is so rich in joy and love and community, seeking heaven.” 

Yet it’s not all religion all the time. The group emphasizes socializing and having a good time. 

The mood lighting, drinks, and boisterous conversations before and after the priest’s talk make the church basement resemble a busy restaurant. 

“We don’t have to hide our faith. And we also don’t have to be the anti-fun group,” Father Schirripa told the Register. “We have a really good way of drawing people in but then calling them to more.”  

‘They’re Christians’ 

Millennials and the Gen Z contingent are known for flexibility, which can also imply a certain lack of direction. But participants at Gate of Heaven show surprising decisiveness when it comes to the young-adults group. 

Trips to the March for Life in Washington, D.C., the churches and shrines of Montreal, the North American Martyrs Shrine in Auriesville, New York, and a weekend retreat on Cape Cod, for instance, have drawn quick responses and no backing out. 

For a winter retreat in February, about 20 people signed up in five minutes. 

“The retreat is $200, and they pay it immediately. People are not just signing up, they’re committing. And doing it with no quibbling,” Smyth said. 

Weekly meetings of the young-adults group start at 7 p.m. Wednesdays in the main church of Gate of Heaven with adoration, during which Emily Tigges, 26, a music teacher at a Catholic school, leads singing. Confession is available during adoration. After a short period of chit-chat in the basement, during which participants have a choice of beer, wine, mixed drinks in cans or seltzer, Father Schirripa gives a talk of about 20 to 25 minutes, often on a teaching from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Afterwards, people congregate for a time and then many make their way to a bar a few blocks away called The Playwright. 

John Carbonneau, 34, assistant general manager of the bar, told the Register that members of the young-adults group don’t drink much, but their presence on a mid-week night is always appreciated. 

“They’re super, super, polite; nicest people in the world,” Carbonneau said. 

“They’re very well-dressed; very well-behaved. They’re Christians,” he said. 

Something Deeper 

Several participants told the Register they come to the young-adults group partly because they crave a sense of community and groundedness they once had but couldn’t find after they went out on their own. 

“I had that example of strong Catholic faith in my family, but I didn’t know anyone my own age who was living like a Catholic,” said Caitlin Costello, 30, who works in sales for a mental health company and started attending the group in November 2024. 

Several members said the January 2025 March for Life, which some members of the group attended together, galvanized them. 

“To me, it was the first time I saw young people being proud about their faith, along the march itself,” Costello said. “That’s when I said, ‘I’m all in.’” 

Among the group are non-Catholics who are interested in the faith and reverts who were raised Catholic but drifted away. 

Hoggins, who described her previous Mass attendance as check-the-box, said the group has helped light a fire in her, adding that she has seen something similar in some of the people who have started attending the sessions. 

“I think people want something deeper than what society says we should be doing,” Hoggins said. “I think a lot of people in my parents’ generation fell off [from] the faith, and my generation is searching for it.” 

Billy Hufnagle, 28, a software engineer who was raised a Catholic on Cape Cod, told the Register he stopped going to church upon entering Boston College as a freshman. 

 In September 2022, he felt his life of work, playing in recreation leagues, and going out on weekends seemed empty. 

 “I wanted something more,” Hufnagle said. 

 That month, he started attending the Gate of Heaven meetings, made friends and started practicing his faith again. He describes the group as the way God brought him back to Himself. 

“The group itself, it’s how he [God] has given me joy through the Church, and it was the most concrete way I was able to keep coming and keep deepening my faith,” Hufnagle said. “The group was the consolation that I needed to keep coming back. 

“And now, it’s where my closest friends are.”