For a preview of the impending Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) national conference, which is anticipated to bring 20,000 people to the Midwest city in January, almost 1,000 Catholic students and adults gathered in St. Louis last weekend.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, FOCUS has not had a national conference in person. Conference planners are hoping that this event will serve to reinvigorate a city where Catholicism, long an important component of society, is substantially on the wane.
The SEEK23 conference, scheduled for Jan. 2–6, 2023, is anticipated to gather tens of thousands of attendees, a major percentage of whom will be college students, to the America’s Center Convention Complex in downtown St. Louis for speeches, seminars, entertainment, prayer, and worship.
Using what it calls “The Little Way of Evangelization,” FOCUS sends missionaries to college campuses across the United States and abroad to spread the Catholic faith primarily through Bible studies and small groups. This method involves converting people to the faith through genuine friendships and training others to do the same.
For those in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, the smaller “SEEK First” event on October 1 served as a preview of the conference. In his speech at St. John Vianney High School in St. Louis, Father Mike Schmitz, the host of the “Bible in a Year” podcast, discussed “allowing Jesus inside your boat” and used the example of St. Peter in Luke 5. In January, Schmitz will make a comeback as a keynote speaker.
Schmitz exhorted the audience to allow God access to every facet of their life—past, present, and future—including their failures, which he said God might use as a chance to “get in our boat” and transform their lives.
“Occasionally, the thing we believe disqualifies us from receiving a call from Jesus is the thing that has opened the door for Jesus to speak to our hearts.
In many respects, it is our failure that allows Jesus to say, “Let me step in,” Schmitz told the gathering. It is not our failure that disqualifies us.
That is how God operates. If we allow him, he makes use of everything about us, including our successes, failures, and prior experiences. He may make use of them to alter the present and create a future for us.
One of FOCUS’ patron saints, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, had a first-class relic on display at the event on October 1. Participants had the chance to see it and pray with it.
Since 2015, FOCUS has been working to go beyond college campuses by developing a Making Missionary Disciples track that would enable it to use its relationship-based evangelization approach in parishes.
Immaculate Conception in Dardenne Prairie, a parish in the St. Louis archdiocese, is one of the parishes where the organization is trying to introduce the concept of sending its missionaries.
St. Louis was selected for SEEK in part due to its convenient location and convention-friendly atmosphere, but also because the city is ready for the kind of renewal that FOCUS seeks to provide, according to Brian Miller, director of evangelization and discipleship for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, who spoke to CNA.
St. Louis is currently undergoing a strategic planning initiative whereby an as-yet-undetermined portion of its 178 parishes will close or merge in an effort to better use archdiocesan resources for evangelization. St. Louis has a historically strong Catholic presence, earning it the informal moniker “The Rome of the West.”
The number of Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Louis fell below 500,000 in 2021 for the first time since the 1960s, according to data from the archdiocese.
The archdiocese is thinking of designating portions of its territory as mission territory as part of the All Things New reform process. Low Catholic population percentages may be seen over large portions of the archdiocese, particularly in areas where Black people predominate.
The archdiocese has already announced that Rosati-Kain High School, an all-girls school, and St. Mary’s High School, an all-boys school, will both close at the end of the current school year due to low enrollment. The archdiocese is anticipated to announce the final plans for parish consolidations and closings in May 2023.
Jesuit Father Kevin Dyer, senior national chaplain for FOCUS and a native of St. Louis, said the city’s strong Catholic heritage and current problems make it “ripe for what FOCUS delivers, which is to rekindle a spirit of missionary discipleship and evangelization inside individuals.”
In the same manner that World Youth Day 1993 in Denver sparked a significant number of vocations and several apostolates, Miller expressed the expectation that SEEK in St. Louis would be like “a little Catholic bomb going off.”
After Indianapolis in 2019 and a smaller student leadership summit in Phoenix in the early days of 2020, SEEK23 will be FOCUS’ first physical conference. Due to the epidemic, conferences for 2021 and 2022 were conducted online.
In his speech to the gathering on October 1, Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis urged the attendees to break down isolation caused by an individualistic culture and a dependence on technology by bringing Christ’s presence to people in a face-to-face setting. He observed that evangelism often takes the shape of individuals seeing the happy testimony of a Catholic friend rather than reasoning or apologetics.
According to Rozanski, “The Lord has sown the seed of faith in our hearts, not just for us to keep it to ourselves but also to share it with others, to share it through the testimony of our lives.”
Rozanski urged individuals in attendance to think about looking into the Making Missionary Disciples track of FOCUS in order to learn more about how to evangelize on a daily basis.
As Vatican II declared, there is a “universal call to holiness” for every individual to spread the Catholic faith, not only an institutional or “programmatic” need for the Church to do so, according to Miller, who said that one of his office’s goals is to encourage Catholics to understand this.
He expressed the hope that people’s hearts would be touched by the knowledge, inspiration, and relationships that SEEK seeks to provide and that they would assist to establish a Catholic presence “in every square mile of the archdiocese.”
Many Catholics, he added, “are accustomed to simply turning up, or to having the programs of the Church take care of evangelism and taking care of other people’s needs. It’s a paradigm change.
Miller said they intend to utilize FOCUS’ Making Missionary Disciples track as a springboard for energizing older Catholics about sharing their faith as well, in addition to the youth and students who will attend SEEK.
He said that his office intended to offer follow-up activities for Catholics in St. Louis to expand on what attendees of SEEK would learn about evangelism and to provide them materials to establish Bible studies and small discipleship groups.
After the merger and closure procedures, he expressed the expectation that when St. Louis’ parishes “come together in their new parish reality,” “they have some common foundation, some similar training, and they have a shared purpose.”