As students on college campuses across Oakland prepared for the typical collegiate weekend Friday evening — a time usually associated with parties and other unbridled merriment — dozens of students instead kicked off the night at the Pittsburgh Oratory chapel for Mass.

Nearly every pew in the small, incense-filled chapel at the Pittsburgh Oratory and Catholic Newman Center on Bayard Street was full.

A few years back, church membership across the country fell below 50% for the first time in modern history, but in Pittsburgh, that trend may be reversing, led by the city’s youngest Catholics.

The number of practicing Catholics on Pittsburgh’s college campuses has swelled since the pandemic, prompting the Oratory — which serves the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Ch

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