Yale’s Most Popular History Course Is Not What You Might Expect

The Calvinistic protestant founders of Yale must be spinning in their graves and weeping and gnashing their teeth in their final home, hell.

From Aleteia

By Rose Bryan

While many people are talking about defunding the humanities and getting away from liberal arts education, this college course is charting a different way forward.

Yale University, voted fourth place as the best National University in the U.S. News and World Report 2026, has a top-enrolled history course, and it’s not the history of law, for which Yale is most famous. Instead, according to Yale history instructor Sergio Infante writing in Slate, the most-enrolled history class at Yale is called “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition.” This popular course welcomed 85 students last spring. It surveys Catholic thinking and writing throughout the Church's 2,000-year history. 

“Each week,” Infante explained, “after scrolling past calls to defund the humanities and to automate the many jobs that make a liberal arts education possible, I found myself surrounded by eager students ready to engage with fourth-century Christology, medieval mysticism, World War II-era debates over ‘just war’ theory, and much more.”

This interest in Catholic courses reflects the findings from recent surveys from the Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study (CES), the Barna Group, and the Gallup poll, to name a few, that show a rise in Catholicism among Gen Zs. Just a decade earlier, “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition” course enrolled a meager 13 students.

Anthony Gross, a Gen Z Catholic influencer, is just one person noting how more and more young people are drawn to the Catholic Church. In a New York Post feature this past spring, he commented:

“I think Gen Z feels really lost, and some of that is a lack of purpose and direction. The  best antidotes to finding those are, number one, God, and number two, connection …”

“The Catholic Intellectual Tradition” course beat out other established popular courses at Yale, such as “The Birth of Europe” and “The Roman Empire.” The course has long been offered at Yale, listed in earlier catalogs as an introductory survey of Catholicism' s interaction with Western culture.

Catholic influence extends beyond the classroom at Yale. The university's St. Thomas More Catholic community had a weekly independent reading course, also focusing on the Catholic intellectual tradition.

As explained on their Instagram:

As the academic year draws to a close, we are sharing highlights from the past semester, including an independent reading course focused on The Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT). The Catholic Intellectual Tradition is the 2,000-year-old practice of integrating faith and reason in a perennial quest for meaning, purpose, and truth. This course focused on the profound renewal that this tradition underwent in the twentieth century. Carlos Eire, T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies, was the instructor of record, and Assistant Chaplain Damon McGraw, PhD, served as guest scholar. The class was offered through Yale College and met weekly at the Thomas E. Golden, Jr. Center.

“What I did not anticipate was how the course would impact me,” said Jeth Fogg, Saybrook College ‘27. “I came in expecting intellectual stimulation, but what I found was something harder to name. The tradition that I encountered in this course integrated my intellectual life to a degree beyond which I had previously experienced. For once, my study of history, my formation in philosophy, my engagement with political theory, and my own life of faith were not running on parallel tracks; they finally converged. The Catholic intellectual tradition in the twentieth century is not something to be surveyed from a safe academic distance. It is a living conversation about what it means to be a human being, and it has the uncomfortable habit of implicating the reader in its conclusions.”

The three undergraduates in the course came from different disciplines; their unique experiences and areas of study enriched the weekly discussions. As a testament of the course’s significance, the group compiled their weekly written reflections into an anthology that preserves their responses to the material they encountered, much of it for the first time.

The Catholic intellectual tradition is the 2,000-year old practice of integrating faith and reason in a perennial quest for meaning, purpose and truth. This course focused on the profound renewal that this tradition underwent in the 20th century.

Those who attended found the information powerful, as was shared by a student on Yale’s St. Thomas More Chapel page.

“What I did not anticipate was how the course would impact me,” said Jeth Fogg, Saybrook College ‘27. “I came in expecting intellectual stimulation, but what I found was something harder to name. The tradition that I encountered in this course integrated my intellectual life to a degree beyond which I had previously experienced. For once, my study of history, my formation in philosophy, my engagement with political theory, and my own life of faith were not running on parallel tracks; they finally converged.

The Catholic intellectual tradition in the 20th century is not something to be surveyed from a safe academic distance. It is a living conversation about what it means to be a human being, and it has the uncomfortable habit of implicating the reader in its conclusions.”

While no independent Yale registrar data or History department enrollment rankings have been officially confirmed, the desire for young people to learn more about Catholicism is rising. Increases in Catholic student organization participation, Mass attendance, and OCIA numbers on U.S. college campuses reflect high numbers, with one dataset from nearly 60 campuses showing an average OCIA participation up approximately 115% year-over-year into 2025-26.

One person who must certainly not be surprised by such interest in Catholicism among the youth is Pope Leo XIV:

“The new generation is not closed to the Gospel; on the contrary, many, when they rediscover it, wish to know it better, because they sense that within it lies the secret to being truly happy.”