By Stephanie Lewis
On a typical Sunday morning, the pews at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church present an unusual sight — they are filled with youth.
A search for the parent who forced them to come under the threat of eternal damnation comes up empty. These teens actually want to be here.
This is partly because of people like Rosemary Ballard, the youth minister at St. Mary’s.
She looks like the average 26 year old, with shoulder-length brown hair, blond highlights and stylish clothing.
In her spare time, she works out on the cross-trainer at the gym, reads, plays guitar, spends time with her friends and brings young people closer to God.
She is part of a movement to help bring more young people into the Catholic Church. The need for youth participation was identified as early as 1975 by Pope Paul VI, who challenged the religious community to pay more attention to young people.
Ballard helps people better experience their faith through youth group meetings, weekend retreats, volunteer opportunities, and other activities geared to best suit the individual teens.
To figure out what each young person needs, she tries to meet with all the youth on the church’s parish list.
“Today, I met a child at Tim Hortons near his house and we chatted about God over coffee and a donut for an hour and a half,” said Ballard.
She is not the only person bringing young people into the church. Many other Ottawa-area churches have youth ministry programs.
Several organizations, such as Catholic Christian Outreach (CCO) are dedicated to a similar mission. This group is aimed at university students.
Tanya Van Buggenhout is a 23-year-old campus minister for CCO at the University of Ottawa.
Like most people her age, she enjoys dancing, playing pool, watching movies, and shopping.
She has been a full time campus minister for three years.
“Our purpose is to give people an opportunity to know other Catholics on campus and learn more about their faith,” she says.
CCO does this by providing peer support, weekly events, summer mission projects, a nation-wide conference and small group Bible studies.
“We try to link their faith to their life,” says Van Buggenhout.
According to Carleton University student John Kealey, they’re succeeding.
He says that when he originally heard about CCO, he quickly dismissed the idea of participating because he wasn’t ready to be involved.
“I was a Sunday Christian,” he says. “I wasn’t ready to practice what I preach.”
A year later, when he heard about a game of Friday-night Jesus Jeopardy, he decided to check things out.
He found two teams playing Bible trivia and having a great time learning about their religion.
“It was the first time I met Catholic students on campus and I thought that these were guys I could really be friends with,” says Kealey.
Now he’s leading Bible studies and he’s heavily involved with CCO.
The last week of January was Jesus Week at Carleton.
Kealey took part by giving out free hot chocolate at the campus bus stop and singing about God in the university’s tunnels as part of Tunnel Worship.
Amy Peloso is a 21-year-old bio-chemistry major who loves tobogganing and winter.
She enjoys the Friday-night activities and the Bible studies provided by CCO at University of Ottawa.
“Bible studies challenged me to know and understand what it’s like to be Catholic,” she says. “They’ve cause me to apply religion to every aspect of my life.”
She explains that even students who never left theChurch also enjoy CCO programs, like the leadership roles they take in Bible-study groups.
Another organization that aims to keep high school and junior high school students involved in the Church is National Evangelization Teams.
The nation-wide youth outreach group works from the archdiocese of Ottawa. Its president is Archbishop Marcel Gervais.
The group trains teams of young people to develop youth ministries, then gives them a van for travel and sends them on missions to go to anywhere from six to 17 diocese and apply what they’ve learned.
In National Evangelization Team’s information kit, Gervais invites others to support the ministry. “I believe that ministering to our youth should be a high priority and I am asking you to join me in investing in the future of our church, our young people, and being a partner in this mission,” he writes.