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Catholic Educators Called to Holiness
More than 300 from all over the world attended the conference this year.
Posted: Wednesday, July 28, 2010
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Shawn Reeves, director of religious education for St. John's Newman Center at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, speaks to participants in the Campus and Young Adult Ministers track.
Father Frederick Miller, author of The Grace of Ars, discusses the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
Franciscan University professor of catechetics Sister Johanna Paruch, FSGM, discusses the soon to be beatified John Henry Cardinal Newman as a catechist.
Bill Keimig (far left) and Gloria Zapiain (second from left), DRE Track coordinators, and Ron Bolster (far right), director of the Catechetics Program at Franciscan University and host of the Bosco conference, stand with 2010 graduates from the DRE track.
Jim Beckman (second from right, in back), Youth Ministry track coordinator, and Ron Bolster, director of the Catechetics Program at Franciscan University and host of the Bosco conference, stand with 2010 graduates from the Youth Ministry track. |
STEUBENVILLE, OH—"Our role in life is to become holy, a saint," said Martha Fernandez-Sardina, director of the Office for Evangelization for the Archdiocese of San Antonio. "Holiness is the perfection of love. Love is the one thing necessary, and for love to take over, you and I must fall head over heels in love with Jesus Christ."
Sardina was one of 34 speakers at Franciscan University of Steubenville's 15th annual St. John Bosco Religious Educators Conference, "The Universal Call to Holiness," July 21-25. Traveling from points as diverse as Canada and Ireland, Slovenia and Alaska, Wisconsin and Oregon, over 300 attendees came seeking sound teaching, wise advice, and personal formation in holiness.
"Holiness is exciting," said conference host Ron Bolster, Franciscan University catechetics professor, "holiness is attractive. When have we not heard that advice—you should speak to so and so, he's the holiest person I know?"
Bolster explained that this year's theme comes from Lumen Gentium, Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, which describes the universal call to holiness.
"We have to get around to the point where we say we have to pursue holiness," said Bolster. "It's difficult, it's rewarding, it's what we're made for. We [religious educators] have the opportunity—some say the obligation—to make others holy."
In his homily at Friday evening's Mass, Steubenville Bishop R. Daniel Conlon gave some advice on how to help make others holy.
"As we preach, as we teach, as we form people in the word of God, as we sow the seed, it is important to remember always that the seed falls on the one," said Bishop Conlon. "The proclamation of the word is ultimately directed to the single human person."
And reaching that single human person can come at a great cost.
"According to St. John Bosco," said Father Lou Molinelli, SDB, in his workshop on Don Bosco's preventive method of religious education, "you graft yourself onto the cross in order to bring these young people to the fullness of life. You're supposed to be Christ who hangs on the cross for them, because you know there's a resurrection at the end."
Such dedication is impossible unless we are holy, reiterated the speakers throughout the conference.
In her keynote address, "Holy, Lord? Me, a Saint?" Fernandez-Sardina said, "Being holy is being full of God—becoming totally permeated and transformed by the divine life."
And holiness is impossible unless we've fallen completely in love with Christ. Only then are we able to love our neighbors, our friends, our families, and our students.
"Unless we love our students," said Franciscan University catechetics professor Sister M. Johanna Paruch, FSGM, in her keynote talk on John Henry Cardinal Newman as a catechist, "we are a booming gong and a clanging cymbal."
She shared stories of Cardinal Newman's deep, driving love for Christ, which compelled him to follow his scholarship right out of Anglicanism and into Catholicism.
"When he became Catholic, in many ways, he was a white martyr. That was the cost he paid for the truth—the Catholics never trusted him, the Protestants hated him," said Sister Paruch. "How much grace have we been given, how much grace do we take for granted, when we who have been born into the faith and never left it just walk through our Catholicism?"
Created by Franciscan University Catechetics Office founder and former professor Barbara Morgan in 1995, the St. John Bosco Conference bears the imprint of the methods and teachings of Msgr. Eugene Kevane, founder of the Notre Dame Catechetical Institute in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia.
Drake McCallister of Franciscan University's Catechetics Office said, "The purpose of the Bosco Conference is to provide direct formation for catechists doing the work in the field, especially those who have never had any training. The conference allows formation doctrinally and methodologically for their discipling, all within the environment of the spiritual renewal provided by campus."
Throughout the conference, participants had opportunities for confession, daily Mass, praise and worship, and eucharistic adoration. Participants chose between a three-day and a five-day conference schedule, with the option to work through a rigorous program over the course of several years and receive a certification in one of several different areas of ministry.
"I learned so much," said Terri Thomas, coordinator of Adult Faith Formation for Holy Trinity Parish in Peachtree, Georgia. "The workshops on the documents from Vatican II and on the General Directory and the National Directory for Catechesis were beautiful. Martha Drennan opened it up for us and guided us through that.
"The workshop on the spiritual life of the catechist was amazing. I feel like I have something I can really use myself and help others practically use and open up and unpack."
Many of the speakers and some graduates of the certification programs are published in The Sower Review, a joint publication of the Maryvale Institute of Birmingham, England, Studium de Notre Dame de Vie of Venasque in France, and Franciscan University of Steubenville. To share the Don Bosco experience, go to http://www.thesowerreview.org/.
For more information on the Don Bosco Conference, including a complete list of conferences for adults and youth, go to www.franciscanconferences.com.
For audio recordings of the main talks by conference speakers, go to www.franciscan.edu/bookstore and click on the "Conferences" tab at the top of the homepage.