My dear brothers and sisters in the Lord,

Last weekend, the Diocese of Brooklyn, through St. John’s University, hosted the annual Steubenville New York Conference. For several years now, the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio has sponsored a youth conference that is attended by over 2,000 young people from all over the East Coast.

This year, there were well over 60 priests in attendance as well as numerous youth ministers working with these young people. I, myself, celebrated the Closing Mass on Sunday and it was an enthusiastic celebration. The music was provided by the National Life Teen Ministry which provides contemporary music for youth events around the country.

I was most impressed by the attention that the young people gave to the liturgy, and in particular the listening audience I had for my homily. One can always tell when people are interested or disinterested, listening or if their thoughts are some place else. In my homily, I presented to this group of young people the image of Dorothy Day as an unlikely saint, truly a woman for our own day and age.

Dorothy Day was born in 1896 and died in 1980; a woman who as I said is an unlikely saint. She was born into a nominally Protestant family and lead what you might say was a Bohemian lifestyle, which is like our modern day hipsters. A Bohemian life is one which has no reference to morality or religion. You might say that Dorothy Day was a radical; she was a woman who fought for the woman’s right to vote in 1917 when they did not have that right.

By the time she was 22 years old, Dorothy had an abortion and a failed relationship. The birth of her daughter, Tamar, born in 1926 within a common law marriage, brought Dorothy great joy and happiness, which lead her to embrace the Catholic faith. When she had her daughter baptized, her companion left her. Dorothy was a single parent who supported herself as a free-lance journalist.

In 1932, she met a French man named Peter Maurin and together they began what still exists today, The Catholic Worker newspaper. It was a newspaper based on a pacifist’s stand in the beginning of the Second World War.

Dorothy, however, was not just a woman of words; she was a woman of action. Her first “House of Hospitality,” where the poor, as well as drug abusers and alcoholics were welcome, opened in 1933. Today there are over 220 Catholic Worker communities existing in the United States and in foreign countries.

And so Dorothy is a wonderful example of faith being the size of a mustard seed. This is also true about faith leading to love. Love grows, love can become so intense as Divine Love, so that human love pales in comparison.

I presented the life of this, hopefully, saint-to-be because her life mirrors in many ways the contemporary youth culture in which our young people have grown up. Dorothy Day once quoted the French philosopher Leon Bloy and said, “There is only one sadness, not to be a saint.”

We must challenge our youth today not just to be faithful Catholics, but to become saints themselves. Perhaps their idea of sainthood, however, is not so attractive to them. The late Cardinal John O’Connor, when he was proposing Dorothy Day for sainthood said she was “not a gingerbread saint or a holy card saint, but a modern day devoted daughter of the Church.” She is one who can truly inspire any of us today in seeking holiness in the midst of the world.

Youth Ministry Initiative

We recently developed a youth ministry initiative in the Diocese in Brooklyn and Queens which is producing much fruit. Almost 50 parishes now either have their own youth minister or share one with a neighboring parish.

If you recall, part of our Capital Campaign case presentation was to fund youth ministry for the next several years, getting it started and rooted in our Church culture. Almost everyone we polled would say their concern is for the youth of Brooklyn and Queens and the future of the Church. This is because for the most part people do not see young people, especially teenagers and young adults, participating in our Sunday Masses. Some of this is because this has become a generational phenomena for the last several generations, hoping that young people will return to the Church.

Today, however, a new phenomena has occurred, a NONE, where young people aged 24 to 40 declare that they have no religion. This covers most of our Catholic youth today. They are unaffiliated; they say that they are “spiritual” but not religious. Certainly, they are not affiliated with any church.

Youth ministry is not just a matter of placing a youth minister in a parish and expecting he or she to become the “Pied Piper” leading youth back to Mass. It is not quite that simple. In the past, there was a young curate at the parish who was responsible for developing youth ministry.

But today our understaffed parishes make it very difficult for any priest to carry out all of those responsibilities. One of our chief aims is to develop our youth ministers themselves. They all must be people of faith and well equipped to deal with the difficulties of our modern culture, which does not support youth in their quest for religious participation much less sanctity itself.

Several months ago I had a chance to meet with most of our youth ministers who were attending a training workshop. At that time, I was able to ask them what difficulties they perceived and how the diocese could better help them accomplish a vibrant youth ministry in Brooklyn and Queens.

Perhaps the most important thing I took away from my meeting with these leaders is that they themselves must feel supported and appreciated, as well as assisted at the local level to accomplish the difficult task of leading our young people back to the faith.

Truthfully, I had some fear and trepidation in trying to preach to those 2,000 young people this past Sunday. But it seemed that the homily hit home for some of them by the comments I heard from them after Mass.

Today our youth ministry is truly like putting out into the deep and not knowing where we will land. While this is difficult, it is more than worth the effort of reaching out to our young people trying to form them the best way possible to ­­­­­continue in their Catholic faith. We need to meet them where they are – on the internet and through social media. The Church too must communicate with the youth. We are doing our best, but we can always do more.

Please join me in praying that the youth ministry in our Diocese in Brooklyn and Queens will produce much fruit with vocations to marriage, as well as the priesthood and religious life.

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