About a hundred young Catholic families have moved to Hyattsville in recent years to help revitalize the local religious community.

Led in part by former city council member and Hyattsville Life & Times publisher Chris Currie, this “intentional community” has helped restore older houses, revitalize the St. Jerome Catholic church and redesign the curriculum at St. Jerome Academy, according to a story in Fare Forward, a Christian quarterly.

There are now unofficially about a hundred young, well-educated, and orthodox families in Hyattsville’s intentional community. “It’s a community without any kind of articles of incorporation or authority structure outside of the parish,” Currie says, “which is the basic unit of Catholic society.” In recent years, St. Jerome Parish has had significantly more baptisms than funerals, reversing a general trend of urban churches with dwindling numbers of mostly elderly parishioners. Several young parishioners have entered the seminary.

Hyattsville was well-positioned for this kind of revival.

St. Jerome’s dates back to 1886 and the school back to 1943, giving the local Catholic community strong local ties. The Catholic University of America is just four miles south while St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church is a little north, near the University of Maryland. There’s even a local Catholic moms group.

But the hard work of Currie and others to bring families to the area and restore the local religious institutions is a major factor in the growth of this community.