Greetings brothers and sisters,
Last weekend, both the youth in Confirmation I and the Catechists were on retreat. Retreats can be such a powerful encounter with the Lord, and often the Holy Spirit can do great work in the time if we’re open to it. Our Youth Ministry Adore Missionaries, Catechists and staff put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears to help the young Church to have authentic encounters with Jesus, to grow in knowledge of Jesus and to send them out to live as missionary disciples.
Before seminary, I spent four and half years as a junior high catechist in my parish and I also worked with the youth ministry core team. It was a blessed experience but also a very challenging one. The surprising thing is, it was not the youths that were challenging, but the culture and family that they lived in that was challenging.
There are two quotes that I love when it comes to teaching and catechizing the youth that give me perspective. The first is this:
“Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery-the preconditions of all true freedom. Parents should teach their children to subordinate the ‘material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.’ Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them.” (CCC 2223)
If we calculate the amount of time the youth actually spends with us in CCE and YM nights, we will find that often it only adds up to about 48 hours a year. That’s only three full days we have with them, the other 363 days are with their family and in school. The impact of parents and the family life is much more powerful.
And the second quote is from Pope Paul VI:
“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses."
In todays society, where information and data is being thrown at us almost at all times of the day, our words get drowned out by the noise... the Word of God gets drowned out by noise. It is through authentic living of the faith and the real and visible joy that comes from the Gospel, that we will be able to overcome the noise of the world.
My hope for our parish, is that we become authentically and joyfully Catholic, so that the witness of our lives and the joy of the Gospel will draw others to encounter and know the salvation of Jesus Christ in their own lives.
You are in my prayers and as always I will offer a Mass for you.
Pax Christi,
Fr. Khoi