Peter Costello
With World Youth Day behind us nowadays, the question obviously is “what’s next?”
The Catholic youth festival is clearly an extraordinarily enthusing time, loaded with spiritual, catechetical, evangelising and social content, but most realistic Catholics recognise that if our youth ministry is directed solely towards such marquee events without looking beyond them, then the seeds planted and nurtured then are unlikely to come to fruition.
One online resource that offers great help for parishes that might be thinking about what to do now is Hannah Vaughan-Spruce’s transformedinchrist.com website.
Focused on her 22-session Confirmation preparation programme for 12-16-year-olds – English Catholics tending to be confirmed later than Irish ones – Hannah’s site is packed with Catechesis directed not just towards early teens but also young adults.
Accompanying the site’s catechetical content is her blog, sometimes reproduced on the always interesting jerichotree.com, which deals more broadly with Hannah’s own thoughts about and experiences with youth ministry.
Posts
Predictably, her most recent posts have reflected on World Youth Day, beginning with her saying, “I have waaayy too much to say about World Youth Day, but here’s the short story: at the end of Cologne (2005) I said I would never go again, at the end of Madrid (2011) I said I would never go again, and I very, very nearly did not go to Krakow.
“But you know what?!” she continued, “You guessed it – I am blown away by the awesomeness and mercy of God that he disregarded my stubbornness and got me there.”
Describing in one post how her group preceded World Youth Day proper with a week that included a pilgrimage to a Marian shrine, daily spiritual conferences, Mass, Adoration and the Rosary every day, and two days of silent retreat, she said the silence was for her “the greatest blessing of the pilgrimage” which proved invaluable in setting her group up for the next week.
That week saw one evening, the Mercy Night in the Tauron Arena, which she notes Los Angeles’ Bishop Robert Barron has called one of the highlights of his entire priesthood. “Amazingly, what was achieved at the Mercy Night was an intimate encounter with Christ, which is incredible when you consider 20,000 people were present,” she writes.
The evening opened with worship music from Matt Maher and Audrey Assad, praying for the Holy Spirit, and built to a procession of the Blessed Sacrament around the arena in way that was “simultaneously awesome and intimate” before Dr Barron spoke on the Cross against the backdrop of the martyrdom in France of Fr Jacques Hamel.
To give people a sense of the evening, she links to videos of the night and to a useful summary by Jeffrey Bruno on aleteia.org.
“My first World Youth Day was eleven years ago,” she observes in her initial post on the festival, pondering the impact of World Youth Day, an event that seems to have been central in the finding of so many modern vocations including as many as a third of the US’s new clergy.
“In Krakow’s market square one day, I bumped into two who had been in that group from our university chaplaincy. They are now both religious, one a Brother with the Community of St John, and the other a Dominican priest. One had said ‘yes’ to his vocation at Cologne in 2005.
Apostolates
“Looking back on the photos of those who went,” she continued, “nearly everyone is married, and the others are single and consecrated in some way, with their own apostolates. It amazed me to reflect on how God has spread us out, each with big groups of young people that we were now pastoring in some way. How beautiful the Church is, bringing young people to Christ from generation to generation! Attracting us to Him, and sending us out!
“World Youth Day is here to stay,” she concludes, “and I think I might be brave enough to say, I’ll go to Panama.”