Young Life Grew My Vision for Catholic Ministry

This guest post was written by Amanda Jewett, youth and young adult minister at St. Cecelia Church in Beaverton, Ore. She serves on the Diocesan Committee on Young Life for the Archdiocese of Portland.

Catholic Youth Minister Amanda Jewett, far right, visited a Young Life camp in 2017.

Two summers ago I attended a Young Life camp in Eastern Oregon as an adult guest. I agreed to visit Washington Family Ranch not knowing much about Young Life. I was curious but did not anticipate that the experience would change the way I view youth ministry.

Similar to any summer camp, there were ropes courses, a zip line, and a swimming pool. But when it came to the program, I noticed right away that Young Life didn’t assume that the 400 campers had faith in God. Young Life expected that most students didn’t yet believe or were still questioning. And this assumption dictated the initial language, music, and message. God wasn’t mentioned a lot the first day, and all the songs were popular secular music. But over the course of a few days, God became the focus of everything. And as I looked around, I saw disconnected teens slowly become more comfortable talking about Jesus. By the end, teens were singing praise and worship songs as loudly and as passionately as they had sung the songs of Taylor Swift and One Direction. Teens were acknowledging their need for God and surrendering to Jesus.

What led to this transformation?

I watched as Young Life made it all about a relationship with Jesus first and foremost. All catechesis and faith formation follows naturally from this relationship or encounter with Christ. Without this foundation, catechesis can be lost or considered irrelevant.

Our Catholic youth need what Young Life prompts teens to develop: a relationship—not just head knowledge, not just the idea of faith—an actual relationship with the actual person of Jesus Christ, who loves us more infinitely and unconditionally than anyone else ever can. I saw Young Life reaching kids in a way I never experienced as a cradle Catholic and one who attended Catholic school from preschool to college, got a degree in theology, and now works for a Catholic parish. At camp, I saw an immense opportunity—an opportunity for these teens, whose lives were being intimately touched by God’s divine presence, but also an opportunity for the Catholic Church to improve its outreach to teens, especially in this day and age.

My exposure to Young Life taught me, as a Catholic, that I am called to go out, especially to the peripheries, so I can encounter teens and spread the Gospel, rather than wait for teens to come to me and my youth group. Like our pontiff Pope Francis has said, we are called to smell like the sheep, and I saw Young Life leaders doing this.

When watching the interactions at camp, I recognized that the Young Life leaders had real and authentic relationships with each one of their kids. Prior to camp, these leaders had gone out to football games, school plays, and robotics tournaments to find these teens, rather than wait for them to come meet the leaders at a Young Life club. Camp was a culmination of months of contact work and relationship building.

This is missionary discipleship. By the very nature of our baptism, we are called to “take on the smell of the sheep” and accompany people on their journeys to Christ. We are a missionary church, and Christ’s Great Commission (Matthew 28) is at the center of that. Should our parish ministries not reflect this as well, going (not staying!) and making disciples of all nations?

Our Catholic faith holds such beauty, depth, and richness, and my identity as a member of the Catholic Church is a source of personal pride and delight. For this reason, I want to learn from Young Life and become more effective in sharing my faith in Christ with teens.

At the time I was visiting the Young Life camp two years ago, my primary concerns at St. Cecilia circled around the number of kids who were attending our church youth group, how well they knew the Catechism, and how heavily involved they became in the life of the parish. All of those are important and play their own roles. Yet I had lost sight of the primary goal, the “why” of Catholic ministry: Do our parish teens have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and are they on the path to sainthood? I had to ask myself a difficult question: Does our youth ministry lead our teens to information, events, and programs, or to a PERSON?

In the two years since my visit to camp, I have engaged with the Young Life ministry in my area. I have befriended my Young Life counterpart who serves at a local high school, and we have done contact work together at the school. I have also joined a committee of Catholics and Protestants who are shepherding a collaborative effort between Young Life and the Catholic Church to reach more kids. As a part of this committee, I helped organize three joint worship nights where Catholic youth ministers and Protestant Young Life leaders met to get to know each other. Even though we are coming from different Christian denominations, we know many of the same kids, and we need to work together if we are going to reach every kid.

I lead youth ministry in Portland, where few claim to be Christian. Most teenagers here are disconnected from a church, and I desire nothing more than to help them find Christ. My exposure to Young Life has inspired me to help build bridges between different Christian denominations and, more importantly, between teenagers and God. I thank God for allowing his Spirit to move in this way, and I ask that He continues to bless and guide us in this work, as we go and make disciples of all nations.

Pope Francis: Let Them Lead from Their Calling

This guest post (the final installment in a four-part series) was written by Craig Gould, Director of Youth & Young Adult Ministries in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is also a member of the Young Life Catholic Relations national board.

For our life on earth reaches full stature when it becomes an offering… It follows that every form of pastoral activity, formation and spirituality should be seen in the light of our Christian vocation. (Christ is Alive!, paragraph 254)

In the last blog, Let them Lead Everywhere, I wrote that Pope Francis’ call to ministry leaders was to let young people lead in all the different places where young people are living their lives, not simply within the bounds of the ministries we have created. For my final post on Christ is Alive!, I am highlighting Pope Francis’ invitation to let young people lead because they are called by God.  

If it’s the end of the school year, you can count on young people being asked vocational questions. The standard would be to graduating seniors as everyone wants to know what they will be doing next year. After 14 years of compulsory school, youth are free to choose what comes next. The decisions they make offer a real insight into how they conceive of their own calling and whether or not God has a place in that. Will they go to college? For two or four years? Will they go to trade school? Will they go right to work? Are they taking a “gap” year or doing a year of service somewhere? 

This question isn’t a surprise since young people have been answering it ever since they were 5, and their kindergarten teacher had them draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up. The real surprise is that after all of this time, those of faith who have relationships with young people haven’t forced the next question, which is: “What is God calling you to do with your life?” If we don’t ask that question, they assume God is outside of this most central part of their life. And it may take years before they reconcile what they’ve said yes to along the way and what God is actually calling them to do. 

I had a phone call last week with a recent college graduate who has decided she wants to work in ministry although she just invested four years studying psychology. I had lunch this week with a friend who is fulfilling her calling as a high school campus minister but admits she spent her college years studying art and philosophy. She wonders whether her love for art fits in with her current work. And next week, I’m meeting with someone who is starting as a church youth minister after spending 30 years as an engineer. Despite their different ages, all three are asking themselves the same set of questions, vocational questions, questions about their gifts and God’s call.

That’s the other thing about vocation. It’s a constant question, or more accurately, a set of questions: 

What am I good at? What do I like? What does the world need? What are my responsibilities? How does being a disciple of Jesus Christ change any of the questions I just asked? How do I hear a call from God? If I make a wrong choice, will God not bless me? Does God only have one specific path for me? 

What I hear Christ is Alive! saying is that for too long those of us who love young people and who want to see Christ at the center of their lives have left them to figure out their calling with only the culture to guide them—a culture where success is measured in popularity, influence, money and attention. And that sounds more like an invitation from the rich young man mentioned in the Gospels than an invitation from the Lord of “sell everything you own and follow me.” Finding their calling with only the culture to guide them is really far from a community that considers itself “collectively responsible for accepting, motivating, encouraging and challenging” young people in their vocation (Christ is Alive!, paragraph 243).

I’d suggest these words push us as leaders of young people to ask ourselves tough questions about calling: 

How do we practice discernment in our own lives? Do we ask our young people questions about how they make decisions? Are we helping young people to identify their gifts and live those out? How do we help parents to see this decision through the eyes of faith? 

Pope Francis: Let Them Lead EVERYWHERE

This guest post (the third in a four-part series) was written by Craig Gould, Director of Youth & Young Adult Ministries in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is also a member of the Young Life Catholic Relations national board.

'Popular' leaders, then, are those able to make everyone, including the poor, the vulnerable, the frail and the wounded, part of the forward march of youth. They do not shun or fear those young people who have experienced hurt or borne the weight of the cross. (Christ is Alive!, paragraph 231)

In the last blog, Pope Francis: Let Them Lead WITH You, I wrote that Pope Francis’ call to ministry leaders was to accompany young people as they lead. In this post, I want to focus on his even more radical vision for young people—that they would lead everywhere. 

There was a common strategy that was used to train me when I was learning to do youth ministry. It was believed that if you got the most popular kid to be active in the ministry, he or she would soon bring lots of other youth. It was purposeful, it was deliberate, sometimes it was successful, but it was elitist.

It was also not scriptural. If Paul and the Holy Spirit are to be consulted, “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). Yet there I was trying to woo the captain of whatever team was in season, believing this to be the best strategy. It would take me a long time to realize that no one would have made Peter captain of anything. Or that Jesus’ tactics would have been criticized the minute he began with Matthew the tax collector.

In youth ministry the temptation is to gradually build up young leaders until we can hand over new levels of responsibility to them when they are ready. Pope Francis isn’t buying our perfectly scripted plan. He’s concerned because when we construct those processes, we are doing so with the intention of creating leaders who will perpetuate us and our programs. And when we do that, we’ve effectively created an exclusionary practice.

I believe the Holy Spirit is using Pope Francis to call us further out of our posture of superiority. How many times have I heard someone from the church or from Young Life complain because a young person didn’t prioritize youth group, or Campaigners, or club—as if their faithfulness to the gospel was measured on the scales of activity that we created? God’s vision for them is bigger than this, and our participation in His kingdom must be bigger as well.

The way I was initially trained had me excluding some students as I went after the popular kid. And it led me toward a rotten internal philosophy where I believed that by building a relationship with the popular kid I could somehow make him “mine,” and he would be an ambassador to draw kids to my (fill in the self-important event here). The Holy Spirit has always been too wild for that kind of manipulation. I am thankful that though it’s taken me a while to grasp it, Jesus has been patient with me.

How patient will young people be with us if we continue to try to fit them into tight windows where only a few will lead?
Where have young people shown incredible leadership outside of official church ministry?
How do I imagine growing the gifts of a young person outside of my structures for discipleship?
What gifts of leadership do we celebrate in young people?
Do we reserve congratulations only for a select few young leaders? 

Pope Francis: Let Them Lead WITH You

This guest post (the second in a four-part series) was written by Craig Gould, Director of Youth & Young Adult Ministries in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is also a member of the Young Life Catholic Relations national board.

The community has an important role in the accompaniment of young people; it should feel collectively responsible for accepting, motivating, encouraging and challenging them. All should regard young people with understanding, appreciation and affection, and avoid constantly judging them or demanding of them a perfection beyond their years. (Christ is Alive!,  paragraph 243)

In the first blog, Pope Francis on Youth Ministry: Let Them Lead, I wrote that Pope Francis’ call to ministry leaders was to let young people be protagonists and people of action. In this post, I want to draw our attention to one of his favorite ideas: Everyone, especially teens, should be accompanied.

My first time leading a group of teens was as a Young Life volunteer leader taking a group of high school guys to summer camp. At 11 pm at night, when we were supposed to be settling, we were still making lots of noise—so much so that a leader from above us came to the door to ask us to quiet down. I’ll never forget when I opened the door and the other leader took one look at 19-year-old me, looked around the room, and asked, “Hey, where’s your leader?”

The other thing I won’t forget was how my mentor, John Grothjan (Gro), showed me how to build relationships with youth—how to pray for them before we spent time together, pray for them silently while we were hanging out, and then pray for them after they had gone home. I learned to always take a notebook to talks to capture what the speaker said so I could bring it back to the small group cabin time later. I could even compare notes with Gro, who after 20 years of doing youth ministry still brought a notebook himself because leaders model leadership. He taught me to show up to the high school graduation and pray over every kid who walked across that stage. One last shot to do my part to put them at the feet of Jesus.

Letting young people lead doesn’t mean abandoning them. Youth ministers know this, Young Life staff know this, but it’s the larger community that sometimes forgets. We have to teach other adults how to walk with young people. As advocates for young people, we’ll have to step into the uncomfortable position of talking to the adults who don’t treat them well.

Yet just as I get comfortable as the ultimate defender of young people, Pope Francis also reminds me:

“A mentor should therefore nurture the seeds of faith in young people, without expecting to immediately see the fruits of the work of the Holy Spirit.” (Christ is Alive!, paragraph 246)

Here’s a list of people who love this young person more or just as much as I do:

the God who created them,
the parents raising them,
the family who cares for them,
friends who know them,
and teachers, coaches, other adults who invested in them.

I want this young person to know Christ, I believe God called me to share the gospel, but I’m not the only working of the Holy Spirit.

So if I’m called to serve youth, but also called with others, how do I: 

Make sure I’m lifting them up in every victory and standing with them in every defeat?

Work with other adults to accompany them—or do I see them as “mine”?

Celebrate what else God is doing in their life beyond the role God has for me?

Share with other adults, in particular their parents, the joys and concerns I see in them?

Accompaniment is hard, but I suppose Jesus feels the same about me, and the Incarnation happened anyway. Thanks be to God!

Pope Francis on Youth Ministry: Let Them Lead

This guest post was written by Craig Gould, Director of Youth & Young Adult Ministries in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is also a member of the Young Life Catholic Relations national board.

Christus Vivit! (Christ is Alive)

“It is likewise important that it (path of growth for young people) has two main goals. One is the development of the kerygma, the foundational experience of encounter with God through Christ’s death and resurrection. The other is growth in fraternal love, community life, and service.” (CV, #213)

If the truth of the New Testament is often summed up with the 16^th verse of the 3^rd chapter from the Gospel of St John, I might suggest that the above line could be considered the summation of all 299 paragraphs (or 66 pages on my computer) from Pope Francis’ letter to young people, Christus Vivit (Christ is Alive!). For certain there are other great lines, but none so succinctly and pointedly captures the aim of the whole letter—and even more so the whole of meetings of bishops and young people—than these two goals.

Accept the kerygma.

Live the kerygma with each other.

I also do not need any clearer of a picture of what it means for Young Life and the Catholic Church to partner together than this mandate here. As a former Young Life staff person, I can testify to the great power of the kerygma I experienced through Young Life. (The “kerygma” here is defined as the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord). As a life-long Catholic who has always been in ministry, I am witness to the reality that as a Universal Church we have, for centuries and across continents, wrestled with what it means to live as community. With those gifts offered together in mission, I believe that the plentiful harvest that Jesus speaks about will be realized.

If those words are encouraging, then these words are prophetic:

“I want to state clearly that young people themselves are agents of youth ministry.” (CV, #203)

For over 20 years I have been a Young Life staff person, a church youth minister, a graduate school youth program director, and a Diocesan director of youth ministry. Nothing has challenged me as much as Pope Francis’ call—no, his demand—that I allow young people to be agents of the gospel. He pushes us to step out of the way and make a space for them to lead. He demands that we recognize that not only can they lead, they must lead if we are going to see missionary discipleship as the Lord envisions it.

Both communities have spaces for this to happen—whether it be campaigners or work crew for Young Life or peer ministers and service camps for the Church. The prophetic voice moves us beyond offering those opportunities to simply the “elite” youth who have proven themselves. It’s a call to full inclusion, a call to a “popular” ministry, which I will explore in my next post.

Encouraged by kerygma and community, challenged by the agency of young people, I’m left to wonder:

What would happen if we let young people lead the kerygma?

What would it look like if young people helped define and bring to life community for all, not just themselves?

What would they do if young people experienced their own ability to bring the gospel to life?

Jesus wasn’t afraid to ask these questions. Pope Francis has reminded us of them. Now it’s time to let the young church give the answers.

"What Can We Do Together?"

“What can we do together?” Pope Francis asked this week in Geneva during his address to the World Council of Churches, representing 350 Christian denominations and over 500 million Christians worldwide. It is a question which echoes through my mind after spending a week with delegates from Catholic dioceses and parishes from around the US at the 6^thAnnual YL Catholic Adult Guest Camp at Timber Wolf Lake. We’re all asking, “What can we do together to reach young men and women who are struggling without a sense of worth, belonging and hope that can only be found in Jesus?” 

We begin with spiritual friendship. Spending time together throughout the week made us realize that underneath the titles and positions, we are all human beings with names and families, joys and hopes, hurts and frailties. We listened to one another. We prayed over each other. We laughed our heads off at club and we cried through so many beautiful moments. We tackled the ropes course together and we heard the gentle voice of Jesus beckoning us forth. This week we became not merely co-laborers in the Lord’s harvest but friends in Christ.

Second, we committed to a common path. With eyes focused on Jesus, we stacked hands on introducing kids to Christ and helping them grow in their faith. We honored our differences without getting mired in disagreements. We chose a path of graciousness and trust rather than arousing suspicion and putting up walls. We discovered that we want the same things – for kids to know Christ, to place their trust in Him as the source of their lives, and to reconnect to the Church, each according to his or her tradition. 

Kathy Goller, Director of Youth & Young Adult Ministry at the Diocese of Buffalo, NY shared, "My experience at the Catholic Adult Guest Week convicted me more than ever that the Catholic Church can, and needs to, partner with Young Life to reach our young people with the hope and love of Christ. Further, it gave me clear ideas and a plan for how to transform those convictions into actions for our diocese!"

Third, we leaned into hope. We all know the state of affairs today. We know that faith is out of fashion and that for every 1 who enters the Church 6 leave. We know what kids are exposed to through social media and modern “entertainment.” Yet the power of the Resurrection compels us forward with hope. God is writing a beautiful story. We saw it right before our eyes. The victory of goodness over evil is real. Walls are coming down. Reconciliation is happening. Lives are being transformed. “The best of Young Life is yet to come,” Jim Rayburn proclaimed in his last days. And I believe that includes widespread partnership with the whole body of Christ – Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox. 

“What can we do together?” A lot, it turns out. And the best is yet to come. 

Sunset on Timber Wolf Lake

Young Life Staffer and Ecumenical Group Meets with the Pope

Today history will be made. Pope Francis will welcome a staff person from Young Life at the Vatican. But first a little backstory.

In 1968, Young Life’s founder, Jim Rayburn, visited Rome where he met with five Catholic seminarians studying for the priesthood. Rayburn loved it. He loved them. He reveled in the meeting, calling it “the highlight of my European tour.” Whether he knew it or not, that meeting ushered a rising tide of unity and shared mission has been growing for half a century. And it is about to reach a true watermark for the kingdom.

In 1969, one year after Rayburn’s powerful visit to Rome, a young man named Marty Caldwell met Jesus Christ through a group of Young Life leaders in Phoenix and it changed his life forever. Nearly 50 years later Marty is now the Executive Vice President of Young Life International Ministries, overseeing the explosive growth of YL ministries in over 100 countries around the world.

Marty has always embraced the ecumenical vision of Young Life and has built abiding friendships with Protestants and Catholics across the country, and in his current role, around the globe. For years Marty has been working with a group of ministry leaders from Phoenix who pray the John 17 prayer of unity for the sake of the city.

Today Marty and this group of John 17 leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, will retrace the steps of Jim Rayburn in Rome but will take it a step further. They will be received by Pope Francis himself. This is truly a day to celebrate as it exemplifies the prayer of Jesus, that we may be one, that we may reach across the dividing lines and walk hand in hand into the world of kids and share with them the abounding love of God in Jesus Christ.

Pope Francis understands the valuable work youth ministers do every day. “You are the ones who accompany young people on their path,” he says, “helping them find the way that leads to Christ.” He furthermore understands the incarnational approach of Young Life that is necessary to reach kids today. “Much more than promoting a series of activities for young people, you walk with them, accompanying them personally in these complex and difficult times.” It is this ministry of accompaniment, meeting kids where they’re at, and walking with them through all of life’s challenges, that creates real and enduring connections. “It’s in this connection,” Pope Francis says, “where a true dialogue can be engaged in by one who lives a personal relation with the Lord Jesus.”

Marty notes, “This is a wonderful opportunity. Our group is small enough to have a good discussion with Pope Francis – about Jesus, about evangelization, about the Church. We’re trusting God is up to some big things among the diverse churches who yearn to see Jesus lifted up.” In a special moment, the group will pray the prayer of John 17 together with the Holy Father. I can only imagine the celebration in heaven, including the likes of Jim Rayburn whose insistence on "majoring in the majors" set the course so many years ago for such a momentous occasion today.

Pray with me, with the mission of Young Life and with the entire Church universal, that our unity today will help the world to know the love of God in Jesus Christ and embrace the life that can only come through him. All glory be to God!

Keep It Simple, Stupid

I used to think that being intelligent meant being complicated.

It just seemed like the more complex, convoluted, and intricately byzantine a person could be, the smarter they appeared. When our culture places so much emphasis on cerebral intelligence (think of the value we place on IQ and ACT scores), it is no wonder that so many of us chase this distorted professorial image – the esoteric thinker, stroking his Rasputinian beard, waxing eloquently about something so mind-blowing and magnificent that none of us simpletons could possibly understand it.

We sit back in awe of such people, with a wonderment that approaches worship, and imagine all the good they’re doing in the world (while consequently feeling inconsequential about our own mundane contributions). “They are so smart,” we mumble, which often merely translates: “I have no idea what he/she just said.”

It seems this phenomenon can infect the Christian ranks as well. We often equate the verbose with the very smart, the opaque with the omniscient. If you really want the good stuff, we intuit, you gotta read the heavy-hitters - Aquinas and Augustine, Bonaventure and Barth, Schweitzer and Schleiermacher (no knock on any of these, by the way). When the Rahnarian run-on sentences become so long that we forget what day it is before reaching the fifth semi-colon, we rest assured that we’re really onto something sophisticated and fresh (though we haven't a clue what that is). 

It is perhaps not surprising that Soren Kierkegaard, nineteenth century Danish philosopher (and no dunce himself) suggested:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly.[1]

Well, I don’t exactly share Kierkegaard’s conspiracy theory about theological reflection. I don’t think of Christians as scheming swindlers (well, at least not all of them).  But I do think he’s touching on something important.  It has to do with the relationship between simplicity and power:

Simple truths transform us.

This perennial axiom is nowhere more important than in our presentation of the gospel. It’s what Pope Francis was getting at when he said, “The message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing.”[2] We should not be “obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines,” he urges. “Do not be preachers of complex doctrines, but rather be announcers of Christ.”[3]

So the question becomes, “What is the core, the essential, the most beautiful, the heart of the Christian message?” Try a few of these on for size, taken from Pope Francis’ exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel:

·      “In [its] basic core, what shines forth is the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead.”[4]

·      “Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us.”[5]

·       “The joyful, patient and persistent preaching of the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ must be your absolute priority.”[6]

·      “The salvation which God offers us is the work of his mercy. No human efforts, however good they may be, can enable us to merit so great a gift.”[7]

·      “What is essential is that the [Christian] be certain that God loves him, that Jesus Christ has saved him and that his love has always the last word.”[8]

What Pope Francis is getting at here is of supreme importance. It’s a message that we’ve heard proclaimed and prescribed by every pontiff before him in the modern era. “The essence of Christianity is Christ,” Pope Benedict XVI said, “not a doctrine, but a person.” Pope John Paul II declared, “We shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person.”[9] “Nothing,” Pope Francis reminds us, “nothing is more solid, profound, secure, meaningful and wisdom-filled than the initial proclamation.”[10]

The point is that the most essential thing, the heart of the Christian message, the essential core of the Gospel is not complicated. It is not complex. It is not a doctrine even. It is a living, breathing reality. It is the simple presence of God among us. It has a gentle face and tender flesh. “Christian doctrine,” Pope Francis pronounces, “is called Jesus Christ.”[11]

The unparalleled brilliance of the mind of God shines forth in the humility of the stable, in the selflessness of a servant, in the scandal of the Cross. It is the simplicity of the Savior, not the complexity, which makes all the difference in the world. For Protestants and Catholics alike, our primary mission is the same – to announce, in word and deed, to each and every human being, the Person of Jesus Christ. There is nothing more important (and more intelligent).

---

[1] Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, ed. Charles E. Moore (Farmington, PA: Plough, 2002), 201.

[2] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), 35.

[3] Pope Francis, Address to the National Ecclesial Congress of Italy (Nov 10, 2015).

[4] Evangelii Gaudium, 36.

[5] Ibid, 39.

[6] Ibid, 110.

[7] Ibid, 112.

[8] Ibid, 151.

[9] Pope John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte, 29.

[10] Evangelii Gaudium, 165.

[11] Pope Francis, Address to the National Ecclesial Congress of Italy (Nov 10, 2015).

In Case You Missed It: Pope Francis In His Own Words

The following words were taken directly from Pope Francis during his recent visit to the United States.[1] They are a compilation of quotes woven together to tell the story of the servant of the servants of God in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They are words for you and me, for our country, and for the entire people of God whose hearts long to be filled with the joy of the gospel.

It is not my intention to offer a plan or to devise a strategy. I have not come to judge you or to lecture you. I have no wish to tell you what to do, because we all know what it is that the Lord asks of us. I have come to testify to the immensity of God’s love.

The Lord goes in search of us; to all of us he stretches out a helping hand. He comes to save us from the lie that says no one can change. He helps us to journey along the paths of life and fulfillment. We know in faith that Jesus seeks us out. He wants to heal our wounds, to soothe our feet which hurt from travelling alone, to wash each of us clean of the dust from our journey. He doesn’t ask us where we have been, he doesn’t question us what about we have done. Jesus comes to meet us, so that he can restore our dignity as children of God.

Jesus keeps knocking on our doors, the doors of our lives. He doesn’t do this by magic, with special effects, with flashing lights and fireworks. Jesus keeps knocking on our door in the faces of our brothers and sisters, in the faces of our neighbors, in the faces of those at our side. Jesus still walks our streets. He is part of our lives.

Each son or daughter of a given country has a mission, a personal and social responsibility. It is not about preaching complicated doctrines, but joyfully proclaiming Christ. A Christianity which “does” little in practice, while incessantly “explaining” its teachings, is dangerously unbalanced. We are promoters of the culture of encounter. We are living sacraments of the God’s embrace. We must constantly relate to others. We are witnesses of God.

Let us remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt 7:12). The brother or sister we wish to reach and redeem, with the power and the closeness of love, counts more than their positions, distant as they may be from what we hold as true and certain. Jesus’ Church is kept whole not by “consuming fire from heaven” (Lk 9:54), but by the secret warmth of the Spirit, who “heals what is wounded, bends what is rigid, straightens what is crooked”.

Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.

Jesus keeps telling his disciples to go, to go out. He urges us to go out and meet others where they really are, not where we think they should be. Go out, again and again, go out without fear, without hesitation. Go out and proclaim this joy which is for all the people. Go out to others and share the good news that God, our Father, walks at our side.

I have come so that we can pray together and offer our God everything that causes us pain, but also everything that gives us hope, so that we can receive from him the power of the resurrection. The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly. For all our differences and disagreements, we can live in a world of peace. Our Father will not be outdone in generosity.

Love is shown by little things. Holiness is always tied to little gestures. These little gestures are those we learn at home, in the family. The family is a factory of hope, of life, of resurrection. Like the warm supper we look forward to at night, the early lunch awaiting someone who gets up early to go to work. Like a blessing before we go to bed, or a hug after we return from a hard day's work. Faith grows when it is lived and shaped by love. That is why our families, our homes, are true domestic churches. They are the right place for faith to become life, and life to become faith.

Jesus tells us not to hold back these little miracles.

So we might ask ourselves: How are we trying to live this way in our homes, in our societies? What kind of world do we want to leave to our children? Our common house can no longer tolerate sterile divisions. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful brings us to God. Because God is good, God is beautiful, God is the truth. May our children find in us men and women capable of joining others in bringing to full flower all the good seeds which the Father has sown!

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[1] Quotes were taken from various addresses delivered by Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the United States: Meeting with the US Bishops at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Address to the Joint Session of Congress, Visit to the Homeless at the Charitable Center of St. Patrick Parish, Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Prayer at the Interreligious Meeting at Ground Zero Memorial, Mass at Madison Square Garden, Festival of Families, Address to Detainees at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, and Mass to Conclude World Meeting of Families.