CAMBRIDGE -- The foam-padded walls of Harvard University's wrestling room have heard as many of Nolan Liess's prayers as the marble pillars of St. Paul Parish down the street.

Inside the Malkin Athletic Center, the walls are painted with inspirational quotes rather than frescoes. The thumping bass of electronic workout music replaces Gregorian chant and the angelic voices of St. Paul Choir School's choristers. For Liess, a 21-year-old economics major, both buildings are holy places.

"Sometimes, when I'm wrestling, it almost feels like a fight for my life at times," he said, "but I've been trying to incorporate my prayer before practice, to stay spiritually guided in practice and to have a spiritual plan."

Although Liess is currently on academic leave from wrestling while interning at a financial firm, he remains close with his teammates.

"He's the man," he said, greeting his teammate Haden Bottiglieri. "He runs Bible study."

Liess, Bottiglieri, and several other wrestlers attend Mass regularly at St. Paul's. Liess tries to pray the rosary before every tournament. When he wrestles, his mind empties into pure, meditative silence, especially when he's doing it with someone close to him. Each match becomes a prayer.

"It's a spot where I can go and clear my mind and not overthink," he said.

Last year, he broke his nose during a match but stayed in the ring until it was over. The resilience he showed during that reminded him of his faith. More significantly, he said, he looked funny walking around with a broken nose. Through prayer, he offers the agony and ecstasy of his sport to God.

"I feel like the suffering aspect parallels Christ a lot, and what Christianity teaches us about suffering," he said. "There's a suffering aspect of Christianity, where it calls you to suffer. It's not an easy faith, and wrestling isn't easy."

Liess is one of 90 catechumens (those who have never been baptized) and candidates (those who are Christian but not Catholic) who will enter the Catholic Church through St. Paul's this Easter, almost three times as many as in recent years. The majority of them will be confirmed at the parish's Easter vigil on April 4. Forty-nine of the new Catholics are Harvard students or faculty. Fourteen candidates, including Liess, were raised in other branches of Christianity before becoming Catholic. Since the pandemic, the number of new Catholics entering the Church at St. Paul's has hovered around 30 per year. Ten years ago, the parish's OCIA class size averaged out at 10.

"The short answer is grace," said Father Nathaniel Sanders, Harvard's undergraduate chaplain. "The Holy Spirit's at work. But it's also something that's been progressing for a number of years."

One reason for ballooning OCIA class sizes is that fewer Catholics are being baptized as children.

"But I also think there's a number of people looking for something," Father Sanders said. "There is an emptiness in much of modern society and culture, and the Church is preaching something eternally true."

Sports teams are a rich source of conversions on campus. Bottiglieri is Liess's confirmation sponsor.

"He's my best friend here," Liess said. "So, it's really cool to have another guy in the faith on the team I can grow with."

Last year, Liess went to wrestling practice four or five times a week. He still maintains a strict fitness regimen to stay in his weight class while attending Mass and other events at St. Paul's. Victory was always of the utmost importance to him. Now that he is about to become Catholic, he has realized that "there are bigger things than wrestling."

"When wrestling is taken away from you through injury or loss, your identity is stripped down a little bit and what you have left is important," he said.

What he has left is his family and his faith.

"I do it for my coaches, my teammates, and winning isn't the most important thing," he said.

Bottiglieri said that Harvard has "a strong athlete-Catholic pipeline" because the peaks and valleys of sports remind athletes that worldly successes and failures are both fleeting.

"I've known Nolan for two years, and in that time, I've watched him grow and mature in his faith in incredible ways," he said. "He's incredibly intellectually curious, and his desire to understand the truth about God and eternal life has led him down a path of exploration and prayer that is inspiring to everyone who knows him."

Father Sanders said that such curiosity explains why Catholicism is seeing renewed interest on elite university campuses.

"I think also this is a place full of inquisitive people, and the richness, the depth of Catholic thought speaks to them. And the beauty of the liturgy engages them in a way that nothing else in their daily life does," he said.

St. Paul's embraces the intellectual side of the faith. The Harvard Catholic Center frequently hosts lectures about the Church's theology, philosophy, art, and music. Liess attends Father Sanders's talks every Tuesday. He's at Mass every Sunday, and on additional days if he can make it. He is at adoration every two weeks. Normally, he would wear a cross around his neck, but the chain broke. His mother was Baptist and his father was Episcopalian. He will be the first Catholic in his family. When he first entered Harvard, he "stumbled into" St. Paul's and began researching the faith.

"Christ is the pillar of Catholicism," he said, "and really looking into what he taught through reading, reading Scripture, reading theology, books on it and whatnot and stuff like that."

He decided he wanted to become Catholic after talking with Father Sanders and his friends on the wrestling team. His confirmation saint is St. Thomas More, a nod to his English roots.

"It's really cool to see someone at that higher education level have such strong faith," he said.

Catechumen Tasha Dambacher chose St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, as her confirmation saint. Music has always been part of her life, and it's what led her to the Church. She decided she wanted to become Catholic while singing in a choir concert at La Madeleine, one of the grandest churches in Paris.

"It's almost an out-of-body experience, in a way, and I think it ceases to be about you and you individually, but your voice melding with others and praising and being a part of something much more beautiful," she said. "And I really believe beauty is from the Lord, and so being a part of that is a really religious experience for me."

Dambacher, a 23-year-old Harvard Law student, grew up in the United Kingdom, attending Anglican services.

"There were a lot of Catholics in my life who seemed like they had things a little bit more sorted than I did, that knew where they were going," she said. "They understood things a little bit more clearly."

While an undergraduate student at Yale University, she attended an evangelical and an Episcopal church. She started visiting the Catholic Center during her first week of classes at Harvard.

"It was super welcoming, super nice," she said. "Father Nate does a really great job of welcoming everyone who wants to do OCIA."

The classes were "a really meditative process." While she sees many young men interested in converting to Catholicism, Dambacher wants to model the ideal of Catholic womanhood.

"I think womanhood has been really devalued in society at large, and so that's something that has been really interesting to explore," she said, adding: "I think it's about embracing being dependent on God, being secure in your faith, being nurturing, being loving, and not just focusing on the external."

When Shay Seneker, a 23-year-old Harvard grad student in human development and education, attended her first Mass in December 2024, she was "overwhelmed and really confused." Now, she and her husband Thomas, a "cradle Catholic," are in the pews at St. Paul's every Sunday.

"I feel very close to God at Mass," she said.

Growing up Baptist in North Carolina, it never made sense to her why there were so many branches of Christianity. When she and Thomas moved to Boston to attend Harvard, they were "looking for something deeper." They wanted to go to church again, so Thomas took her to Mass. The music and liturgy at St. Paul's appealed to her, as did the Church's continuity over the centuries.

"I think it's really amazing that Catholicism attracts so many people from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, everything," he said. "It seems that everybody from all these different groups is here in this place, and I think that's really special."