St. Peter Catholic Student Center launches campaign for new chapel after attendance spikes

St. Peter Catholic Student Center launches campaign for new chapel after attendance spikes Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email By Josh Siatkowski | Lead Writer After multiple years of Sundays in an overflowing chapel, St. Peter Catholic Student Center has entered the early stages of building a facility to accommodate its growing congregation. St. Peter, a ministry of the Diocese of Austin, opened in 1999 and launched a $10 million campaign late last month to build a new 450-seat chapel. The facility will connect to the current student center on 9th Street and, along with the new chapel, will update the current church offices and add a new narthex. According to Rev. Henry Finch, St. Peter’s rector, the project culminates years of steady growth. When he began his role in 2021, the church typically saw about 500 attendees — mostly students — across four services in a 175-seat chapel. Today, attendance across the four services is nearing 900. “As soon as I arrived five years ago or so, I realized that we had more or less outgrown this facility even at that time,” he said. Because of consistent year-after-year growth, St. Peter’s expansion is much older than the campaign launched a few weeks ago. The land for the expansion was purchased in 2023 with help from the Diocese of Austin and a major individual donor, and the first half of the $10 million campaign total was secured through a year of private fundraising. The project comes at a dynamic time for the Catholic Church, both locally and nationally. At Baylor, Catholicism has steadily grown its foothold on campus since the university’s founding, and it now makes up 14% of the student body, according to Baylor’s Office of Institutional Research. While the proportion of Catholics at Baylor has remained consistent over the last decade, the gap between Catholics and Baptists has tightened: only 17% of Baylor students self-identified as Baptists in 2025, compared to almost 30% 10 years ago. The raw number of Catholic students at Baylor in 2025 was around 2,800, up from about 2,650 in 2015. The population hit a recent high in 2021, when 3,269 self-identified Catholics were enrolled. At the national scale, Catholicism has also drawn attention for reports of increased conversions among young people. The Guardian reported in August that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles saw a 54% year-over-year increase in people signing up to be baptized, many of whom were in their early 20s. While experts say it is still unclear whether this movement is a sustained, nationwide trend, Finch said the growth of St. Peter and many churches like it is very real. “Our lived experience in the South in particular is one of growing congregations,” Finch said. “I mean that our pews are fuller than they’ve ever been, and that there’s a greater interest than we’ve ever seen.” St. Peter’s “Basic Teachings” ministry has seen that interest on an even more amplified scale. Meant to walk new converts or raised-but-unconfirmed Catholics through the confirmation process, Finch said after teaching 20 students in 2021, he had over 130 sign up for the course this year, and over 75 regularly attend the sessions. For Finch, the conversion reports stem from a search for beauty and a rejection of moral relativism, which has become prevalent in secular culture. “In a world that sort of glorifies the ugly and the base, and that sort of features this in its media and entertainment and these kinds of things, there is an attraction to a church that makes that underscores and emphasizes the beautiful in her worship of the Lord. “The second thing would be the church’s commitment to the compatibility of faith and reason in her quest for truth,” he continued. “This generation has been fed relativism and has found it wanting, unsatisfying and not a solid foundation upon which to stand, and so there’s a desire for something that’s stable and timeless and unchanging, and they’re finding that in the church’s articulation of the truth.” For Waco junior Peter Foley, who has attended St. Peter since 2014, conversations about and conversions to the Catholic church are something he’s seen at Baylor. “I definitely have seen that on campus, especially in the [Honors Residential College], which is the dorm I was in when I was living on campus,” he said. “The return to that kind of reverence and the return to that kind of tradition has spoken to a lot of young people and given them kind of like a higher meaning, which I think they’ve lacked up to this point.” Finch himself is a protestant convert who joined the Catholic church in his time at Texas A&M. It has allowed him to engage better with curious Protestants and value traditional Baptist practices like intellectual preaching, memorization of scriptural passages and personal relationships with God. His past has also helped him respect the tradition that dominates Baylor’s culture. “The way we’re approaching this project and our continued growth is in gratitude for the opportunities the university has afforded us for collaboration,” Finch said. “So it’s very much a symbiotic relationship, and I think that’s something we want to continue to nurture.” While no timeline has been confirmed for construction, Finch said he hopes to finish fundraising in around 18 months. From there, construction will take another 18 months to complete. “A lot of the guys, especially upperclassmen like me, we know it’s going to be completed after we leave, but we just still love to like think about one day how we have a new student center that can accommodate all of our needs, and we won’t have to squeeze into the pews with everybody,” Foley said. Catholic Catholic student center Catholicism church church attendance construction Religion St. Peter Catholic Student Center