A New Springtime on Campus - in More Ways than One

Like a lot of upper-class college students this year, the New Evangelization called for by Pope John Paul II will turn 21 years old. As it does, we would do well to revisit the past and make plans for the future of evangelization on the campuses of America's colleges and universities.

Youth for the Third Millennium, an apostolate of Regnum Christi, has been responding with vigor to the Holy Father's summons to “go out onto the streets and into public places like the first apostles who preached Christ” to the world.

Since its inception in 1994, Youth for the Third Millennium missionaries have gone door to door and parish to parish in cities around the world proclaiming the reason for the hope that is in them (1 Peter 3:15). They have made headlines in Paris, Rome and Toronto, where they commanded international attention at World Youth Days with the Pope.

Their combined local and national missions take place at various intervals during the year and in many different cities. These missions regularly involve 100 or more young missionaries. Annually, a “mega-mission” takes place in Mexico, and it has been attracting tens of thousands of young people in recent years.

These young men and women spend a week or more evangelizing local communities and assisting in the work of nearby parishes and Catholic charities. During the missions, they lead intensely Eucharistic lives, spending long hours in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament and attending daily Mass together. There are also opportunities for confession and spiritual direction. In evangelizing others, they are evangelized, too.

Since it began, Youth for the Third Millennium has established rural and urban missions, humanitarian programs, Bible camps for children, sports clinics for teen-agers, evangelization workshops for college and high-school students, Eucharistic and Marian processions for families, and food-collection missions for the poor and the elderly.

Following the successes of Youth for the Third Millennium, more young people started to get involved in the work of the New Evangelization.

In 1999, for instance, Jonathan Morris, now a Legion of Christ priest, began to bring Catholic college students and their professors together in Rhode Island, where he was doing an internship in preparation for his priestly ordination.

He wanted to form a vibrant chain of faith that would encircle colleges and universities. And so, some months later, those first meetings gave birth to Compass, a national and, now, international network of Catholic college students.

Compass aims to convert college campuses to Christ. While this is an ambitious goal, the group has begun to make significant progress already. Its members devote themselves to a deep spiritual life and to study of the Church's teachings and the lives of her saints.

Compass students can be found on more than 14 campuses in the United States and Canada, including several of the military academies, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, College of the Holy Cross and the University of Toronto.

Compass' activities include annual conferences, internship programs, seminars, debates, discussion groups and even a fellowship program that takes place in Switzerland or Austria every summer. All of its programs and events are oriented toward college students and their work of evangelization at their home institutions.

Yet the most intriguing development among Catholic college students has been the emergence of “Catholic households.” These small enclaves of spiritually serious men and women are modeled on Greek associations. But, unlike their decadent counterparts, these groups are regular spiritual powerhouses.

At the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, for example, small groups of men and women live together in their respective dormitories. They can be found in groups attending daily Mass or spending time in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. While the members of “Catholic households” do not always turn out to be priests or nuns, they do go forward to bring Christ into the middle of the world.

Groups such as Youth for the Third Millennium, Compass and Steubenville's “Catholic households” are responding with vigor to the Pope's call for a New Evangelization. Through their efforts the New Evangelization is beginning to establish itself in even the most remote posts of the Catholic world.

St. Anselm College just north of Boston is a case in point. The school is one of the oldest Catholic and Benedictine colleges in America. Students have graduated from its programs in the sciences, nursing, politics and the humanities and have gone on to do tremendous things for the Church and for the world.

I graduated from St. A's in spring 2003. Before leaving, I had established a strong base of Catholic friends with whom I attended Mass and Eucharistic adoration on a regular basis. Some of my friends and I used to meet on Thursday nights to pray the rosary.

It was our distinctively Catholic friendship that brought one young man back to the Church. Eventually he joined our prayer group, became a theology major and is now thinking very seriously about life as a Franciscan friar.

The “methodology” that unites all of these efforts at evangelization is an ancient one. And it is really quite simple. It involves the biblical invitation to “come and see.”

As John Paul wrote in his 2001 apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (At the Beginning of the New Millennium): “If Christ is presented to young people as he really is, they experience him as an answer that is convincing and they can accept his message, even when it is demanding and bears the mark of the cross.”

Youth for the Third Millennium, Compass, Franciscan University's Catholic households — and my small group of distinctively Catholic friends — all based their efforts at evangelization on that single principle.

Many have responded to our invitations to “come and see” Christ as he really is. In so doing, they have found the deep joy of heart and true freedom that characterize Christian people.

John Paul Shimek will begin graduate studies in philosophy at The Catholic University of America in the fall. He lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin.