I often listen to talks by Monsignor James Shea. He has his finger on the pulse of the culture and has profound prophetic vision, especially in his insights on how to minister to young people. In preparation for the upcoming semester as the Catholic Campus Ministry Coordinator of a small liberal arts college, I listened to his 2024 talk entitled Forgive the Sins of My Youth. In it, he said something that cut me to the core: in reference to ministering to young people, he instructed, “Be who you needed when you were young.”
I can remember viscerally being a lost young person in need of truly holy witnesses and guides. My 20s were a complicated time. I had gone through being a 9/11 relief worker, struggled through PTSD, and wandered from the Catholic Church in the immediate years following my honorable discharge from the Navy. While in undergraduate studies, I found myself in an ideologically hostile environment, and my Catholic community was made up almost entirely of cafeteria Catholics.
I was struggling through a very dark period in my life. I was hungering for authentic leadership and witness but found myself surrounded by people who, though well-meaning, offered only false mercy and lies. They repeatedly told me to ignore Church teaching on a whole host of issues. They, like myself at the time, did not understand that we can never find healing and freedom without a total surrender to Christ and the entirety of Church teaching.
I also struggled to find reliable people. This has always been a struggle. The more a person suffers, the harder it is to find reliable people. A psychologist offering a gender identity workshop in my diocese recently made the comment that “when we suffer and grieve people scatter.” This is not how we are supposed to be as Christians, but in a time of over-busyness and distraction, the sufferings of others are inconvenient and uncomfortable. Decades of too-comfortable parishes have convinced us that following Christ isn’t supposed to be uncomfortable. This is a diabolical lie, but we believe it anyway. The Good News is immensely uncomfortable, and if it isn’t, then we aren’t fully living discipleship.
All these thoughts and memories came rushing back as I listened to Monsignor Shea’s talk. The stories he shares in his talks are the same ones I could share. The brokenness of young people is profoundly deep. I’ve only been serving in campus ministry for 8 months, and I’ve already encountered the darkness of abuse, addiction, abortion, the occult, diabolical activity, hook-up culture, drugs, binge drinking, lukewarmness, and so much more. What I see is a generation of young people carrying gaping wounds. They long to be loved, but don’t know what authentic love looks like.
We are made for and by Love. The Lord wants to reach into the darkness and bring us into His radiant light where we experience His perfect Divine Love. Young people are hungry for meaning but don’t know where to look. They desire power and control but don’t understand that the path to freedom is surrender. They desire to change the world around them but can’t see how they need to change themselves first. They’ve been taught to never show weakness or extend forgive—that hardness is better than gentleness; that hooking up is better and safer than a lasting marriage, priesthood, or religious life; that they must decide their future plans, while never asking God what He has made them for. They are anxious, tired, overwhelmed, and struggling to keep their heads above water.
The Church’s response must be to look squarely at this brokenness, rather than to overt our eyes. We must look into the suffering hearts of these young people and stay with them at the foot of the Cross. We must be the witness we desperately needed when we were younger but couldn’t find. My students are shocked when I am willing to show up for them. They don’t understand the persistence of my presence in their lives and how I will drop everything to help them when they are in crisis. They don’t understand the deeper intensity within me that encourages them to greatness and holiness. This is how Our Lord and Our Lady love.
It’s easy to lament the state of the culture and young people on social media; it is quite another to walk into the belly of the beast on a college campus with the desire to bring Christ and His Church to the lost souls battered upon the rocks of nihilism, relativism, hedonism, feminism, and individualism. If more Catholics were seeking to be authentic and reliable witnesses to young people, then our culture would change. The young people in our pews need spiritual mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters of all kinds—people committed to the fullness of truth and love of Christ and His Church—to encourage them on the path to holiness.
This isn’t easy. It requires tremendous patience. We must accept the very practical realization that they will often ignore our warnings and concerns and do destructive things anyway. We have to relinquish control and accept that we can only help those who want to be helped. As Christian witnesses we are called primarily to love, to share the truth in love and to back it up by our actions and dependability.
This generation has trust issues because countless young people come from abusive or chaotic families torn apart by divorce, addiction, single parenting, and generational sins. They have spent their lives ingesting horrifying news via social media that previous generations were never privy to. The dysfunction is off the charts. We must be a stabilizing force in their lives in order for them to come to know the love of Christ.
Who did you need when you were younger? I needed someone who simultaneously witnessed to the truths of the Catholic Church and proclaimed them to me. I needed someone who would sit with me in my pain, sorrow, and brokenness. I needed to feel safe and at peace. Empty words that are not matched with actions don’t work because young people can smell inauthenticity a mile away.
A student told me recently that a non-Catholic undergrad I had met with was so struck by how “different” the chaplain and I were that he wanted to start attending some of our events. He saw the Lord operating in us, and all we did was show up. In this sense, evangelization is simple. We just need to show up for people in need. This is often what is lacking in evangelization initiatives. We don’t want to show up in dark places, like dimly lit hospital rooms or college campuses, because they are uncomfortable. But it is precisely in these places that the Lord wants to shine brightest.
Young people do not need our infighting on social media or our constant condemnation. They need us to be there for them. They need us to love them to the truth. The Lord does not walk up to the woman caught in adultery or sit with the woman at the well and berate them. He berates the Pharisees and Sadducees who are hard-hearted. The lost are the ones He invites into a new way of living through an encounter with His love, mercy, healing, and freedom. This is not to ignore grave sins; rather, it is to practice true accompaniment which leads young people to the fullness of truth.
Sometimes I have to be firm with my students because they wander too far, but most of the time, they need me to do simple tasks for them, like give them rides and chat with them. They need me to be reliable enough to show up, even when they are extremely poor planners or do things at the last minute. They need to know that they can trust me enough to bring their lost friends to me, who I will sit and engage with out of love for Christ and each individual person. They need to know I will pick up the phone if they are in crisis. They need me to show up in prayer and in person. It’s that simple.
We need to become the person we needed when we were younger. We need to be the person who is reliable, who loves like Christ, and who is different from the other people in their lives. By showing up, they begin to see that Christ is the One who is at work. That He is showing up and loving them. Step by step they can begin to walk towards Him and away from the lies of the culture.
Photo by Adam Custer on Unsplash
