This beloved saint wrestled with her own dark night of the soul.

One of Mother Teresa’s deepest fears after she founded the Missionaries of Charity was that she or one of her sisters and brothers would do or say something to cause scandal or detract from the Order’s mission. In all likelihood this explains, at least in part, her reluctance to speak publicly of the interior locutions she had experienced for seven or eight months after the call within a call came on the train to Darjeeling. 

Yet Teresa did cause scandal, although only after she’d been dead for a decade, and then only for a short time. In 2007, Come Be My Light, a book that collected many of her most personal and private correspondence, was published. It immediately caused sorrow and confusion in her admirers and a glee that bordered on what the Germans call schadenfreude, taking pleasure in another’s misfortune, in her detractors.

Her letters revealed that, except for one short period, Teresa had been afflicted with a deep sense of God’s absence for the last half-century of her life. Such was her unflagging dedication to the work she’d undertaken for God that most of the world was completely unsuspecting of her spiritual darkness. 

On hearing the news, many Christians were confused. What did Teresa’s long stay in the spiritual wilderness mean? Was she a victim of depression? Had she lost faith in God? What gave her the inner strength to carry on even when she anguished over what she felt to be God’s abandonment of her? 

Even Teresa’s closest companions in the Missionaries of Charity were bewildered. Never had she made any reference to the darkness except for an oblique reference that would’ve meant nothing to anyone but her confessors with whom she shared what she was going through. Four years before she died, she warned her sisters that “the Devil” is continuously on the prowl in order to “make you feel it is impossible that Jesus really loves you, is really cleaving to you. This is a danger for all of us.” None of them could have guessed that the remark was autobiographical. 

For their part, Teresa’s detractors pointed to the revelations in Come Be My Light as evidence that Teresa was a faux-saint whose public displays of piety were hypocritical. Longtime critic Christopher Hitchens declared that the letters revealed Teresa to be a “confused old lady” who had “ceased to believe,” and whose service to others was nothing more than “part of an effort to still the misery within.” He also argued that the Catholic Church’s interpretation of Teresa’s time in the desert as a dark night of the soul was a perverse piece of marketing that sought to spin despair as faith.   

A Soul in Anguish

There’s no sense in denying that Mother Teresa’s sojourn in the wilderness is disconcerting. If God can seem absent to a saint like her, what chance do the rest of us have to connect with God? It’s also quite probably true, given the nature of her work among the poorest of the poor, that at times Teresa felt psychologically depressed or burnt out. What normal person wouldn’t? But to conclude that the darkness was the result of depression, much less loss of faith, is to overlook its spiritual significance. 

Psychological depression is me-centered; the depressive’s gaze is always directed inward. Teresa’s, on the other hand, was directed outward, to the God whose absence she so keenly felt. Depression renders a sufferer listless; Mother Teresa was always on the go, doing the work to which she felt God had called her. Moreover, dark periods don’t necessarily suggest a loss of faith. Instead, they are recognized in the Christian tradition as periods of great spiritual development. 

Many Christian saints have recounted their own experiences of darkness in their relationships with God, but it was the sixteenth-century St. John of the Cross who wrote what’s still considered to be the best analysis of them. Not surprisingly, Mother Teresa knew his writings, and once remarked that even though John’s words made her “hunger for God,” they also expressed what for her was “the terrible feeling of being ‘unwanted’ by Him.”

For John of the Cross, the noche oscura or “dark night of the soul” is a forlorn feeling of being abandoned by God. “Both the sense and the spirit,” he writes, “as though under an immense and dark load, undergo such agony and pain that the soul would consider death a relief.” The soul suffers most from the conviction that “God has rejected it, and with abhorrence cast it into darkness.” 

But what feels like abandonment is far from it. The painful sense of being rejected by God is actually a purgation of the senses and spirit that prepares the way for an “inflow of God into the soul.” There is no set time limit for a dark night of the soul, although most do not last as long as Mother Teresa’s did. Nor does the dark night mean that the sufferer has ceased to believe in God, although intense doubts can arise.

In one of her letters, Mother Teresa writes, “In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not really existing.”8 But the occasional dreadful thought that God may be a fiction wasn’t her primary torment. 

Even if Teresa had never read John of the Cross’s description of the noche oscura, she would’ve had some idea of it from her namesake, St. Thérèse de Lisieux, the Little Flower, who likewise suffered from a sense of abandonment toward the end of her short life. Thérèse wrote that “God hides, is wrapped in darkness,” and she accounted for this by arguing that the love of Christ is so overwhelming that its fullness has to be withheld from mortals, a withdrawal that naturally causes suffering.

Mother Teresa’s suffering when God hid from her was intense. From first to last, her private correspondence to her confessors attests to that. Just a few passages, representative of the whole, convey something of the loneliness into which her sense of God’s absence drove her.

The longing for God is terribly painful and yet the darkness is becoming greater. What contradiction there is in my soul.

—The pain within is so great…Please ask Our Lady to be my Mother in this darkness.
The place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me.
In the darkness…Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me?…
The one You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved.
I call, I cling,
I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on
Whom I can cling; no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark—and I am alone.
Before I used to get such help & consolation from spiritual direction—from the time the work has started—nothing.

“The work” Teresa mentions in the last quotation refers, of course, to the ministry to which she was called on that providential train trip to Darjeeling. What especially bewildered and saddened her was that the darkness had descended in 1949, right when she believed she was doing precisely the work God had created her to do. Her loss of the presence of God coincided with the granting of the long-sought permission to found the order that became the Missionaries of Charity. Surely the Vatican’s approval was a sign from God that he loved her and wanted her to succeed. But it was just at that point that she felt the door slam shut. God disappeared. 

There was to be but one time the door opened in her many years of darkness. Pius XII was the pontiff who gave permission to found her Order. When he died in October 1958, Archbishop Périer celebrated a requiem Mass in the Calcutta cathedral. Teresa attended, and on that same day received a respite from her forlornness. As she wrote Périer, “I prayed to [Pius] for a proof that God is pleased with the Society. There & then disappeared that long darkness, that pain of loss—of loneliness—of that strange suffering of ten years. Today my soul is filled with love.” 

But in just a short time, God “thought it better for me to be in the tunnel—so He is gone again.” Teresa would endure the tunnel for the next four decades.  

Yes to God

As the years of darkness came and went, Mother Teresa slowly began to see them as something different from the dark night of the soul described by John of the Cross and experienced by Thérèse de Lisieux. It was, she concluded, an essential part of her vocation as a Missionary of Charity. 

Even as a teenager back in Skobje, Teresa had longed to serve the poor. When she became a missionary nun, she spent her Sundays roaming the slums around the Loreto compound bringing relief to the poor. When she received the call within a call, she dedicated the rest of her life to giving the poor, the sick, the lonely, and the dying the love that the world had denied them. Moreover, she voluntarily took on their poverty as her own. 

Teresa dedicated her life to this work because she believed that Christ demanded it of her. As she so often said, when she succored the poor and the sick, she ministered to Christ in his distressing disguise, the Christ who thirsted. So it was perhaps inevitable, given that she shared in the suffering of the people she served, that Teresa would eventually discern her own inner poverty as a share in the suffering of Christ himself. She remembered the oath she’d made back in 1942 never to deny God anything asked of her, and she realized that loyalty to the oath meant embracing God’s withdrawal. 

“We must know exactly when we say yes to God what is in that yes. Yes means ‘I surrender,’ totally, fully, without any counting the cost.” It meant accepting whatever God gave, and giving whatever God chose to take away. And for Teresa, it meant accepting the burden of Christ’s Passion. 

When she was allowed that insight into the nature of her darkness, she recognized it as an inevitable aspect of the call within a call, and would go so far as to say that she actually loved the darkness because it was “a part, a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness & pain on earth.” 

Lost and Found

Teresa’s final years were ones in which poor health and physical suffering became her daily burden. Just a few months before her death, suffering from heart failure and pneumonia, she lay in a hospital bed, unable to speak because of the bronchial tube that had been inserted to help her breathe. She tried to communicate with her caretakers by writing on slips of paper, but was too weak to do so. Finally, mustering all her strength, she was able to scrawl, “I want Jesus.” Mass was celebrated in her hospital room and she was able to take a small amount of the consecrated wine.

Those who were with her at the time believed that her request for Jesus meant that she desired the Eucharist, and that’s surely a part of what she meant to communicate.

But given her decades of living without a sense of Christ’s presence, it’s not too much to conclude that she also meant she wanted the darkness of God’s withdrawal to end. She’d spent over fifty years reliving Christ’s Passion. If it was God’s will that she suffer, so be it. But she longed for it to end. 

In 1962, in the second decade of her sense of abandonment, Teresa wrote something that anticipated her later understanding of her vocation to suffer the Passion of Christ, “If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” 

This is an extraordinary thing to say, because it suggests that Mother Teresa was willing to relinquish the joy of heaven for the sake of those of us who also lie awake in the night wondering where God has gone. No one would deny that the diminutive nun who served Christ in his distressing disguise for over fifty years deserved some rest. But Teresa thought otherwise. Her lifelong dedication to serving God in his people was, so far as she was concerned, only an apprenticeship for her real work after she died.

Young people have forgotten how to date responsibly. Boston College’s Dr. Kerry Cronin sought to change that.
A documentary—and a nationwide conversation—soon followed.

Kerry Cronin, PhD, believes in dating.

As a professor of philosophy at Boston College and a fellow at the Center for Student Formation, Cronin has met hundreds of students in her more than 20 years of teaching, counseling, and mentoring at the Jesuit university. When she realized that the young people in her seminars and classes were not dating, but participating in the hook-up culture, she realized that kids didn’t know how to date. It is a lost art that she is trying to reestablish by giving them a dating assignment. Cronin’s experiment is the subject of the recent documentary The Dating Project.

There is a deep irony in this story, however. At 52, Cronin is single and only occasionally dates. Her family is amused that she gives this assignment to her students. “I have never been known to be good at dating,” Cronin tells St. Anthony Messenger. “My family laughs about it, but they have always been incredibly supportive. When the film was released, wherever they were across the country, they went to see it, and they love it.”

Cronin decided to assign dating to her students—first for extra credit and then for a grade. The idea was not to marry them off. Instead, she wanted them to experience traditional dating as an alternative to the hook-up culture. Her students acknowledge that talking to someone face-to-face can be harder than having sex in the dark with someone they barely know. So Cronin created the step-by-step assignment for her class and recalled for them her own past relationships.

“Dating made me begin to think about how to make someone else’s journey my own and how to share with someone else,” she says.

Released earlier this year, The Dating Project features Cronin as well as five young adults—from college students to career professionals—as they navigate the dating experience. It came about when coproducers Megan Harrington and Catherine Fowler Sample went out with friends one night and realized that most of them were unmarried and not dating. This intrigued them, so they started doing research for a documentary and discovered Cronin’s dating assignment. Harrington says that this turned into “a film about being human, about self-worth, and questioning what we are being sold by the popular culture.”

The idea behind the film was fascinating—as equally fascinating as the woman who created the assignment.

Catholic Roots

Cronin was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the fifth of six children and the only girl. She went to St. Justin’s Elementary School and Northwest Catholic High School. From there, she studied philosophy at Boston College. Cronin describes herself as a peacemaker, someone who is always trying to smooth things out. “I am not confrontational. I am loyal and a good listener,” she says. These traits serve her well as a professor and mentor to young adults at Boston College.

Her family has deep Catholic roots. Three of her uncles, now deceased, were priests. Her paternal uncle was Father James J. Cronin, a pastor in the Hartford Archdiocese, who was a great supporter of Catholic schools and known for his ability to foster active and dynamic participation in his parishes. One of her maternal uncles was Father James Flanagan, founder of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity. The other was Father Joseph Flanagan, SJ, a professor at Boston College. He had the most influence on Cronin’s intellectual and working life. Looking back at her family, she says that in their home, if you waited around long enough, a Mass would be celebrated because one of her uncles was visiting. “Some very good things were modeled for us growing up in our family,” she says.

And that has informed Cronin’s teaching. Around 2010, she started talking to her students about dating and relationships, as she explains in The Dating Project. She recognized that the term hooking up is vague: It could mean kissing, touching, or going even further. Students often gain status among their peers by bragging about their sexual exploits. Cronin set about changing that. She asked the students to go on a date that first year—which none of them did because they had no idea how. Film and television rarely show kids about traditional dating, and parents don’t often share their own dating experiences. Young adults are stressed about being rejected. The whole model for dating was gone.

“Dating is a social script that is no longer being supported by our culture,” Cronin says. She confronted her students with a question: Is it really easier to hook up with someone rather than ask them out for a cup of coffee? After lengthy discussion, her students realized that dating is, in fact, easier.

“They want a way out of the hook-up culture, but no one had offered it to them. Hence, the dating assignment,” she says. When Cronin gave her students the assignment, she told them they had to ask someone face-to-face out on a date—no texting. The assignment was a way to step outside of the pressure of the dominant social script of the hook-up culture on college campuses. The assignment turned out to be a seamless expression of Cronin’s philosophical studies about moral reasoning, self-awareness, responsibility, and ongoing student formation in the Jesuit tradition of the college.

Higher Learning

Cronin breaks down the dating experience into three levels. Level one means you can be going for coffee with several different people. By level two, if a kiss is involved, it implies exclusivity, and the attraction between both parties should be acknowledged. Real relationship work begins with level three, when you ask yourself, Can I lean on this person emotionally? Is this person going to become one of the primary emotional relationships in my life?

Cronin reassures her students that they shouldn’t get to level three too early, and certainly not by the second date. One problem she sees for students is that they start having level-three conversations when they are only at level one—too much, too soon.

When approaching the assignment, Cronin’s students feared rejection. They had a compassionate mentor to help guide them. “Originally, when I gave this dating assignment, most of the students would say it was something they wanted to do. I was willing to talk to them about their fears and their awkwardness. This helped them. I am always ready to laugh about dating and encourage them not to take themselves too seriously,” Cronin says.

“After a couple of years, students had already heard about it, so they knew it was coming. In some cases, they took the class specifically so they would get this assignment.”

But not everyone thinks Cronin’s dating assignment is a good idea. One student simply did not want to do it. Another identified as asexual and, therefore, did not wish to participate. Cronin says she is always happy to receive feedback and is supportive of their self-knowledge.

“I would not push anyone who didn’t want to do the assignment. But, developmentally, so much is going on in college students,” she says. “It is a productive time for good questions, so I respond by asking them to consider why or why not they will fulfill the assignment.”

Sound Advice

Cronin bemoans the fact that there are so few books for parents to help their kids date in a healthy way. Cronin loves the spiritual memoir Girl Meets God: On the Path to the Spiritual Life, by Lauren F. Winner. The author talks insightfully about how Christians view sex in healthy and unhealthy ways. “I am in support of right relationships according to Church teaching,” Cronin says. She cautions that purity language on the part of parents can make moral choices seem overly rigid—more emphasis on rules than on love and fidelity.

“Going back to the moral imagination that is so important in my own life, I would advise young adults, when they are trying to figure out how to be a good person and to treat their own bodies and feelings with respect, to come to terms with their own desires and fears. It is not helpful for them to overemphasize or underemphasize their romantic ideas.”

As for dating apps, Cronin says it’s a high-stakes game. “It’s a very fast education because some people want to hook up. Or they want to keep you on a leash and then just disappear. These apps do give a person a sense of the people who are out there looking for a relationship, but there are a lot of creeps out there too.”

What’s most important for Cronin is that her students are asking questions and seeking answers—to the joy of their professor.

“I have to say, I am gifted with a very easily delighted temperament, so most of life delights me,” Cronin says. “Every class has its own dynamic. Last year’s class had the most genuine questions ever. This feedback really meant something to them because they had a genuine interest in what we were talking about. When a question comes from a place of real curiosity, it just delights me.”

Sidebar: Love & Dating in ‘Reel Time’

The Dating Project is a relevant documentary that offers insight for teens, parents, clergy, youth ministers, and, of course, college professors. When viewers see the students eagerly taking notes during Kerry Cronin’s classes, they see that the film addresses a great need. But as a film reviewer, I had to ask Dr. Cronin if she ever uses mainstream movies in her classes. She doesn’t, though she likes the idea. She is a romance film buff herself and provides three films that could easily integrate into her classes as examples of dating in cinema.

The Wedding Plan (2016) “It is a film about a young woman who has faith that God will send her a husband. The main character does take a spiritually active role in making that happen, but it raises romance and theological questions. I am constantly raising the issue in my classes about the supposition that many of us have: If it’s meant to happen, it will. This is preposterous to me—as if you don’t have to do anything about it. I don’t subscribe to this theology that all we have to do is sit around until God drops someone into our laps. I think of our relationship with God as much more participatory.”

The Proposal (2009) “What I love about this film is the interesting way young adults close themselves off from romance and relationships. Sandra Bullock’s character does a great job of communicating why we shut out our emotions. The Ryan Reynolds character proposes at the end of the film. When she asks why, he says, ‘I want to date you.’ In other words, ‘I want to get to know you better.’ This is a fantastic scene that supports the dating assignment very well.”

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008) “This film has a great plot because the characters are getting out of bad situations with unhealthy people. It shows how to get over an ex: that staying with the wrong people is not healthy, that allowing a new connection to happen is a good thing, that having great friends who tell you what you need to hear is a gift. Nick and Norah spend a night getting into crazy mishaps. It’s wonderful in its portrayal of how we talk to each other—and don’t talk to each other—as we get to know each other.”

For too long, suicide has been shrouded in darkness. Father Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, wants to bring this tragedy out of the shadows of shame and into the light of God’s healing love.

It’s the 10th overall leading cause of death in the United States. Yet few of us know much about it, and fewer of us talk about it. Author and spiritual leader Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, has been speaking and preaching about suicide for decades.

In an effort to get us talking and to provide a resource for families in crisis, he recently wrote a book, Bruised and Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide (Paraclete Press). He talked with us about an issue he considers one of the “deepest taboos in human experience.”

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 45,000 people take their lives each year in the United States, 123 per day. That would be five people during the next hour, on average. In addition, there are a whopping 25 times as many attempted suicides each year. Victims of successful suicide are mostly middle-aged white men (70 percent in 2016). Sadly, the rate of suicide has been on the rise since 2007. Slightly more American soldiers—close to 5,000—have killed themselves after coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan than have been killed in service in those wars.

One would think that something so widespread would get a lot of attention. But, says Father Rolheiser: “It’s something we don’t understand. If someone in our family or a loved one uses suicide, there’s a hush, almost a shame about it.” You never see it mentioned in an obituary, he observes. “They died ‘suddenly,’ ‘tragically,’ ‘sadly.’ It’s like we even struggle to mention the word.”

Understanding Suicide

There is no out-of-the-box solution that would quickly reduce or eliminate suicide. We finally are starting to recognize it as the final stage of various types of mental illness. “The impulse for life is the strongest impulse inside of a human being, and suicide goes against that,” observes Father Rolheiser. “Thus, in all religions, it was seen as the ultimate act of despair.” We may not talk about suicide when it hits close to home. Yet, he says: “I don’t think anything devastates a family, spouse, or friends as much as a suicide. It wreaks horrible psychological havoc.”

Father Rolheiser says we need to think of the physiological causes behind suicide, to get beyond talking in hushed tones about this consequence of mental illness. “We have to begin to understand mental health the same as we understand physical health,” he insists. We need to switch our thinking to terminal illness. “When people die of cancer or they die of heart attacks or diabetes or pneumonia, we say, ‘There’s nothing this person could do.'”

We don’t say that, though, with suicide. “We don’t understand that mental health is like physical health. People die against their will, whether it’s through cancer or a stroke or whatever. Suicide, in the vast majority of cases, is the equivalent to an emotional heart attack or an emotional cancer.”

Sometimes suicide can come without warning, like a heart attack. “Other times suicide is like a terminal illness. Individuals have been depressed and struggling their whole lives and eventually they succumb.” In those cases, Father Rolheiser says, “It’s almost inevitable. Unless something changes, this person is eventually going to succumb to this.” Depression can often be treated with medical care.

God’s Mercy

When you dig a bit, a proclamation in the Apostles’ Creed sheds light on God’s mercy to victims of suicide and their families. “‘He descended into hell,’ ” says Father Rolheiser, “is the most consoling doctrine in all of religion.” It has a “catechetical iconography” of undoing the fall of Adam and Eve; that is, it stands as a compelling image of God’s saving action and stirs our faith. “It teaches us something about God.”

But there is another dimension, he adds. “Great theologians, like Gregory of Nyssa through to Julian of Norwich, to Hans Urs von Balthasar, would say that what that doctrine means is that, precisely, Christ can go through locked doors.” That speaks loudly in the case of suicide. “Some suicidal people I’ve known were wonderful, sensitive people, but they got themselves into a private emotional hell into which no psychiatry, human being, or love could ever penetrate. And they killed themselves. You can be sure on the other side, Jesus wasn’t inside their huddle of fear.” Father Rolheiser recalls the image in the Gospel of John of the disciples behind locked doors (Jn 20:19‚ 23).

“Notice Jesus doesn’t knock on the door. He comes right through the locked doors, right in the center of their fears, and breathes out peace.”

That liberating breath of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, is not just for suicide victims, of course, adds this priest. “Sometimes we can keep woundedness, bitterness, where nobody can touch it anymore this side of eternity.” We may not be able to get there, but “our great Christian doctrine is that Jesus can. That is the ultimate part of the doctrine of grace.”

Left Behind

After the person who commits suicide is gone, survivors are often plagued with guilt: What did I do wrong? What could I have done to prevent this? Why wasn’t I more attentive? In truth, says Father Rolheiser, survivors of a suicide victim had long ago been placed outside the loop. “The anatomy of suicide is precisely to do it when you’re not there,” says Father Rolheiser. “It’s part of the sickness, that as it builds up, suicidal persons begin to isolate themselves.” They become secretive; then they seal off their intentions. “So you aren’t there precisely for the reason that they’re planning that you’re not going to be there. That’s part of the anatomy of the disease.”

A feeling of relief might come after a suicide—the problem is finally completed, gone. That can cause waves of guilt. Perhaps a family feared suicide for years or months, keeping an eye out, calling, worrying. “As much as they grieved, they thought, Well, he’s finally at peace, and finally we’re at peace.” It’s like keeping vigil—like watching a terminal patient die.

“You could feel real guilty about it; it’s a natural reaction,” says Father Rolheiser. “But you could do nothing to stop it.” Perhaps one of the biggest struggles for those closest to a suicide victim, one that can go on for years or even a lifetime, is the hush and shame of having a suicide in the family or among close friends. “We automatically see the person’s life through the prism of their death,” observes Father Rolheiser.

The antidote is refusing to do that. He speaks of his good friend Virgilio Elizondo, a pioneering priest of international reputation who committed suicide in 2016. At age 80, Elizondo was plagued by health issues, and faced, from a year earlier, an accusation of sexual abuse that was never substantiated, even after his death (though the sexual abuse victim clearly had been abused by another priest). “Had [Elizondo] died of cancer, it doesn’t change his work, the person he was. Yet his suicide clouds his legacy.

We need to see suicide victims’ lives and their achievements and fruitfulness in the same way as you see everybody else’s,” Father Rolheiser insists. What led to the suicide is an illness. “It doesn’t take away from the fact that he was a magnificent man and did all this great work.”

Help in Community

Parishes could be a key to helping families victimized by suicide, says Father Rolheiser. Indeed, that’s a reason he wrote his new book: as a resource for people suddenly coping with suicide. That coping, at its best, could be community- wide. “Parishes could have adult education around suicide,” he suggests. This often happens in schools where there’s a suicide: Administrators bring in counselors to help students process the tragedy.

Talking about suicide in a healthier way is the key for Father Rolheiser. Although his work is generally well received, he consistently gets some pushback. Some people—comparatively few—say: “‘You’re making suicide an option. By removing the taboo and saying the person isn’t going to hell, you’re abetting suicide.’ They might say, ‘If you start having classes on suicide, you’re going to have a lot of people saying once you take the ultimate stigma away, then more people will commit suicide.'”

Nothing could be further from the truth, he insists. Removing the stigma, talking openly about suicide, honoring the victim’s life—all would be a tremendous service to the parish. Truly, it would go much further than that. Father Rolheiser is committed to changing attitudes everywhere. “As a young priest, one of the first funerals I had to do was a suicide of a 36-year-old man with kids,” he relates.

“I just thought, I have to address this. I can’t just give a nice, safe homily that we believe in the Resurrection and so on.” During his homily, he put the suicide into a healthier perspective, acknowledging the illness. That made the difference for that devastated community. And Father Rolheiser has been working to make that difference ever since.

Resources

• Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide: www.CatholicCharities.net/GetHelp/OurServices/Counseling/Loss.aspx

• American Association of Suicidology: www.Suicidology.org

• American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: www.afsp.org

• Suicide Awareness Voices of Education: www.Save.org

• Jed Foundation: www.JedFoundation.org

• National Suicide Prevention Hotline: www.SuicidePreventionLifeline.org 1-800-273-8255

• National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention: ActionAllianceforSuicidePrevention.org

^{—Source: Catholic News Service and National Suicide Prevention Hotline}

The V Encuentro process aims to reawaken the faith and gifts of Hispanic Catholics in the United States.

Julio Beltran knows something about divine providence. Five years ago, the Texas ministry leader drove 250 miles with all his belongings to start a job in the Beaumont Diocese, not knowing where he would stay. Unperturbed, he eventually reached a friend who had a room for him.

Now the diocese’s assistant director of Hispanic ministry, Beltran, 35, again faces uncertainty as he advocates for Catholic youth and young adults in a national Hispanic process convened by the US bishops called V Encuentro, September 20-23, 2018. (V signifies the fifth such process since 1972, and encuentro means “encounter.”)

A “dreamer” who came from Mexico with his parents as a teen and now hopes for US citizenship, Beltran doesn’t know if he’ll have the chance to see youth find their place in the Church. He was granted deferred action from deportation under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy and has fewer than two years remaining on his work permit. Without US government action allowing Beltran and other young adults brought to the United States as children to stay in the country, his status is not secure. But he is trusting God.

A New Generation of Hispanic Leaders

Beltran advocates especially for first- and second-generation Hispanic youth as he helps coordinate the V Encuentro process, which is reaching some of the estimated 30 million US Hispanics who identify as Catholic.

“The Latino community is growing in big numbers, and I think we lack a lot of leadership who know how to work with this bicultural reality of the young people,” says Beltran. “I really hope that the bishops and other ecclesial leaders support more formation of leadership and others who know how to work with the young people.”

Inspired by Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), V Encuentro leaders and participants have sought to discern ways the US Church can better respond to the Hispanic presence and to strengthen their own response to the call for new evangelization as missionary disciples.

Convened in 2013, V Encuentro launched a national dialogue among US Hispanic Catholics that began in parishes, lay ecclesial movements, schools and universities, and other Catholic organizations across the country. Following conversations about their needs, aspirations, and roles in the Church, participants continued the dialogue at diocesan and regional gatherings.

This month, 3,000 delegates selected at the earlier meetings, as well as many cardinals, bishops, and priests, will attend the V National Encuentro in Grapevine, Texas. Conclusions and recommendations from the process are being compiled and will be reviewed by the US bishops. Through the process, V Encuentro leaders hope to identify 20,000 new Church leaders to replace lay ecclesial leaders expected to retire in the next 10 years, according to Alejandro Aguilera-Titus,
the V Encuentro national coordinator.

As of June, more than 330,000 Catholics of different ages and backgrounds had participated in parish and diocesan programs across the country. As part of the process, many have learned techniques for evangelizing family, friends, and neighbors. Some, like Beltran, grapple with immigration issues, but they’ve also expressed the need for a greater sense of community and more faith formation and other programs, especially in Spanish.

Since the last Encuentro process in 2000, more than 20 million Hispanics have immigrated to the United States. According to the Washington-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), about 70 percent of all Hispanics are Catholic.

“Now we’re coming to the threshold where we’re saying we’ve got so much more and we need to focus and for people to understand the reality of the US Church, the intercultural involvement,” says Deacon Milton Vega, 64, who, with his wife, Elia, 68, lives in St. Johns, Florida.

Hispanic Catholics have made progress, but “there was a need to reawaken with a calling from the pope himself to go and reach out and reawaken the faith in every community,” says Deacon Milton, a V Encuentro participant. “That is one of our goals.”

Welcoming Newcomers

Though the Vegas are both native Spanish speakers, they sometimes struggled to understand each other when they began dating in 1971.

“We were divided by a common language,” says Deacon Milton, whose Puerto Rican Spanish differs from the Spanish that Elia grew up speaking in Peru.

Their situation reveals the challenge immigrants from 23 predominantly Spanish-speaking countries and territories outside the United States can experience in understanding each other, as well as learning English. By welcoming the newcomers and bridging the communication barrier, parishes can encourage them to become involved, Deacon Milton says. “If we are going to successfully integrate as a nation, we have to begin at home in the Church,” he says.

The Vegas meet Hispanics from many places in their work as catechists in their parish, Most Holy Redeemer in Jacksonville, Florida, and as they travel through the St. Augustine Diocese. They see a great need for faith formation, especially in Spanish. “We go out to the peripheries as the pope says and go and teach and spread the Gospel out there and try to help with the formation of newcomers to the faith,” he says.

Says Elia: “There are many, many adults who need to get their sacraments. Either the three Sacraments of Initiation or two of them; some were baptized but never got Confirmation and Communion.”

The Vegas themselves returned to the faith later in life. After experiencing conversions on a 2002 retreat, they’ve gradually become more involved in ministry in their parish and diocese. They have two grown sons. As V Encuentro leaders, they’ve talked with other Hispanic Catholics on the parish, diocesan, and regional levels about the need for formation and the Church’s role in intercultural involvement.

“We can be an outreach to the folks who are now coming into our nation who are members of the Catholic Church,” Deacon Milton says.

Hispanic Catholics of all ages are seeking the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) and faith formation, but many parishes lack Spanish-language RCIA and formation materials, he says.

“What is happening is separated brethren [Protestant congregations] are providing the facilities for them to go to,” he says. “They’re giving them the books.”

Reaching Out to Youth and Young Adults

Juan Andres Villa, 21, knows about Hispanic Catholics leaving the Church to join Protestant denominations. Two of his sisters became members of nondenominational churches when they were in their mid-20s. Had his sisters known about the Encuentro process when they were younger, they might have remained Catholic, says Villa, who lives in San Bernardino, California.

Villa fell in love with the Catholic faith as a teen in the high school youth group his mother started five years ago at their parish, Our Lady of Guadalupe. He now helps lead the group, which is active in faith and social justice. As an Encuentro participant, he wants to represent the concerns of youth who can’t directly participate because they are minors. In some parishes, youth have struggled to get support and resources to start youth ministry.

“The Church hasn’t been supportive of young people and hasn’t taken time to understand we have a hope that’s awesome,” he says. “One of the things the Church struggles with is pushing down funnels to local parishes. The Church has goals, [but] Pope Francis’ message has to get translated down to have this conversation.”

Villa attends college and works as a youth minister and community activist. He has been part of V Encuentro planning in his diocese for the past three years and hopes to become one of the V National Encuentro delegates. “In the Encuentro process, what I love so much about it is not [only] doing work inside the walls of the church, [but] also being involved in community,” he says.

Young adults are ready to become Church leaders, but it would help if the Church understood young adult culture, he says.

Villa says V Encuentro participants learn from listening to each other. “The most important part is making change, a direct change to the way the Catholic Church in the United States is going to be,” he says. “The process makes you excited about being a Catholic.”

Beltran enjoys seeing how the Gospel transforms young people. But he feels the needs of many young bilingual/bicultural Catholics are being overlooked in the Church. “The young people are bicultural, and I think that in some ways we haven’t appreciated, respected, or promoted these bicultural gifts that they bring,” he says.

He cites a statistic that 73 percent of Catholic young people under 18 in Texas are Hispanics, adding that they could be better represented in Church leadership.

“In the main culture, the message they hear is that they’re not American enough, and, within the Hispanic pastoral juvenil [youth and young adult ministry], they receive the message that they’re not Hispanic enough,” Beltran says, adding that the two cultures could be better integrated.

“I think it’s really a fundamental part to educate, to guide the young people because they are the present and will be the future,” he says, acknowledging that fewer young people are participating in V Encuentro than hoped. “I really believe these young people can bring a lot of gifts to the Church and all society.”

More ministries specifically for youth and young adults can help them use those gifts, he says. “They want a space where they can be active in the community, have their own sense of community, and express themselves without feeling judged or criticized.”

Finding Joy in Sharing the Faith

Lisseth and Maria Garcia reach out to the Hispanic community through their online Christian radio station. From their home in Peoria, Illinois, the mother and daughter broadcast Spanish-language Christian music, Scripture, and other spiritual messages. But they also evangelize in person through their parish, other ministries, and the V Encuentro process.

Lisseth, 42, attributes her faith to lessons her grandfather taught her while she was growing up in Guatemala. “He said, ‘Wherever you go, whatever you say, whatever you do, God is with you.'”

Last year, Lisseth and Maria, 14, along with others from their parish, St. Mary Immaculate in Plainfield, Illinois, participated in a V Encuentro small group. After praying and studying Pope Francis’ teaching on evangelization, the Garcias and friends brought the Gospel message into their neighborhood, local stores, and a hospital.

“It’s an amazing experience to go away from the church because inside the church we learn, but outside the church we need to put the message in the hearts because a lot of people have a lot of problems,” says Lisseth, who teaches Spanish at a Catholic grade school.

Following their success, Lisseth, Maria, and their friends taught a larger parish group about evangelization and led a discussion where parishioners identified the need for a Spanish-language youth group, a Bible study, and possibilities for further online study about the Catholic faith. The pastor has begun to respond to the requests, Lisseth says. “If we learn, we have something to give the community,” she says.

Maria also has seen opportunities for Hispanic youth through V Encuentro. “I think we teens should be more involved in the Church because we’re the future, and . . . what we bring to the future is what the next generations are going to have,” she says. “We want the faith in people to grow so they know more about God and so they can put all their faith in him and they won’t be depressed.”

With her hope that V Encuentro will benefit the US Hispanic Catholic community, Lisseth prays for an increase of faith in the Church and in the desire to serve others. “Now‚ after the V Encuentro‚ we open our ears, mouths, and hearts, and go move to find where you can do something for someone,” she says.

A Brief History of the Encuentro: Hispanic Catholics Find Their Voice

For the past 46 years, the National Encuentro processes have given US Hispanic Catholics opportunities to come together to discern how they respond as Church. During that time, their voices have grown more clear and resonant in an increasingly diverse US Church.

Quoted on the V Encuentro website (VEncuentro.org), Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Arturo Cepeda stated that previous Encuentros have been the “backbone” during the growth of Hispanic ministry, providing an opportunity to interpret and project into the future Hispanic identity, presence, and contribution to the Church and US society as a whole.

When US bishops convened the first Encuentro in 1972, an estimated 10 million Hispanics lived in the United States, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. The goal of the first Encuentro process was to enable the baptized Catholics in this population to “come out of the shadows” as they expressed their needs, aspirations, and contributions.

Five years later, the second Encuentro went further, as US Hispanic Catholics identified themselves as a diverse community united in faith, history, and language. During this process, they discerned a way of being Church based in the ecclesiology of communion and a preferential option for those who are estranged or living in poverty. Eight years later, at the third Encuentro, Hispanic Catholics articulated a clear direction for the Church’s response to the Hispanic presence and their response as Church. The vision was recorded in the “Plan Pastoral Nacional del Ministerio Hispano” (1987), and in an evangelizing, communal, and missionary model of the Church.

By the fourth Encuentro in 2000, the US Hispanic population had grown to more than 35 million. IV Encuentro was an opportunity for US Hispanic Catholics to share the Encuentro experience with all the cultures and races represented in the US Church. The first national Encuentro of youth ministry in 2006 presented an opportunity to listen to Hispanic youth and discern how to respond to their needs.

During the 18-year gap between the IV Encuentro and the current one, the US Hispanic population grew by almost 20 million. During that time, Church leaders have devoted a great deal of time to assisting new arrivals, according to Encuentro leaders. During the V Encuentro, US Hispanic Catholics have been encouraged to continue their walk as God’s people, raise their voices, and discern pastoral priorities and strategies.

The secular culture doesn’t help young people understand this. We are not taught to deal with suffering or grief in a healthy way. The wildly popular show Thirteen Reasons Why, which sanitizes suicide, is marketed predominantly to teenagers. It doesn’t help when a young person who is a visual learner, and is struggling with bullying, low self-confidence, depression, or issues of sexual assault at high school, watches a show that justifies that this is enough of a reason to feel as if she or he no longer needs to live, followed by specifically how to “end” these problems.

Social media doesn’t help kids to be any better-off, either. Following the carefully selected, highly edited moments of other people’s lives—with all of the sad times and struggles purposely left out—doesn’t exactly help an ordinary teen living an ordinary life feel as if his or her beautifully ordinary life is worth living. It diminishes joy and establishes deep roots of unworthiness upon comparison.

We all go through rough times when we lose people we love, miss out on something, or see our plans get derailed. Sometimes this punches us in the gut, and we really just want clarity, but instead we get confusion, pain, and suffering. These are all scary feelings that often don’t make any sense. But as Father Mike Schmitz says in his video with Ascension Press, there are two ways of looking at life: “that everything is worth it, or that nothing is worth it at all.” It is the job of the individual to allow suffering to take place, but also to understand that there is a power and a purpose to the suffering he or she endures.

Be Not Afraid

We were born to live bravely. “Do not fear,” God said both to Joshua (Jos 1:9) and to Abraham (Gn 15:1). Jacob was afraid (Gn 31:31; 32:8), and so were Moses (Ex 2:14), Peter (Mt 26:69), and the apostles (Mk 4:38-40). Jesus himself experienced fear and suffering (Mt 26:37; Lk 22:44). Pope Francis posed this thought in a March 2015 address: “Ask yourselves: What upsets me, what do I fear most in this specific moment of my life today? What blocks me and prevents me from moving forward? Why do I lack the courage to make the important choices I need to make? Do not be afraid to face your fears honestly, to recognize them for what they are, and to come to terms with them.”

Every day if we decide to trust that what is happening to us is intentional and embrace it fully with joy and wholeheartedly put our all into loving as Jesus did to each person we meet, can you imagine what joy and meaning we could bring to our peers? We were born to be disciples of Jesus’ joyful message.

The Bible talks about this idea in James 1:2-3, that when our faith gets tested, it gives us an opportunity to grow: “Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” You could also say that if we want our faith to get stronger, we need to experience and make it out of some challenging places.

Finding Joy

Life is not meant to be overwhelming at all times. It also isn’t supposed to just be survived. It is meant to be lived joyfully. Pope Francis writes, “Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendor and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties” (“Joy of the Gospel,” 167). There will certainly be times, though, when the storms are going to toss you around and you’ll be out of breath, but that’s when you start treading water until the sun starts shining again. That is when you smile because there’s a rainbow, and you finally make it to shore. This is your life, the one that is worth living. Do with it what you please, but you only get one, so I recommend letting go of fear and finding joy in Christ.

Some of you who are reading this may be struggling with depression, anxiety, or other mental health challenges. You may be feeling broken, tired, and sad more often than not. You may be even contemplating suicide because you feel that things cannot possibly get better. Silence solves nothing. September is National Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month. One conversation can change a life. Be not afraid to ask for help.

If you or a friend is struggling with suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (available 24 hours a day). For Catholic counseling, contact your parish priest, diocese, or local branch of Catholic Charities.

Students, staff, and faculty at 24 Franciscan colleges and universities in the United States are growing through pilgrimages, classes, and community service.

Whether it’s veterans readjusting to civilian life, business students exploring ethical issues, graduates serving in ministries with friars or the Franciscan sisters who sponsor their university, or Protestants who want to grow in their faith, students at Franciscan colleges and universities are allowing the vision of Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi to take deeper root in their lives.

St. Anthony Messenger spoke with five of the many schools that showcased programs during the June 5‚ 7 symposium of the Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities (AFCU), held at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. Check out our description of four more AFCU programs.

In addition, the 10-month Padua Program, designed to help Franciscan educational and other ministries deepen their Franciscan values, begins with a four-day conference at St. Bonaventure University (Allegany, New York) next month.

Of the 24 AFCU schools, 17 began as internal schools for women’s congregations, especially to train teachers and nurses. Those schools later accepted other women students and eventually became coed. The other seven began as men’s schools and later became coed.

St. Bonaventure University and Viterbo University

‘Rediscovering Their Souls’

When Richard Trietley, who served in the US Army for 22 years—including two planning missions and a combat deployment in Afghanistan in 2003—participated in the 2014 Veterans’ Franciscan Pilgrimage to Assisi and Rome, he did not expect to return “with a sense of peace and optimism for life after my military career. To spend such quality time with my brothers and sisters in arms was an experience that I will never forget.”

He notes that the pilgrimage encourages many veterans to open up with their peers about very difficult experiences. That sharing continued back at St. Bonaventure University (SBU) through regular meetings with other veterans who had made this pilgrimage, faculty/staff members, and nonmilitary students.

A holder of a graduate degree in education from Webster University and an undergraduate education degree from SBU, Trietley later served as Army ROTC commander there, director of safety and security, and finally vice president of student affairs. In July 2017, he began serving in the same capacity at Viterbo University in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. He introduced this veterans’ pilgrimage at SBU and continues promoting it at Viterbo.

Last May, five male and female veterans from St. Bonaventure University and 14 others (some retired) made the veterans’ pilgrimage. The Franciscan Pilgrimage Programs hosts “pilgrimage weekends” in Scottsdale (Arizona), Oceanside (California), and Tiffin (Ohio). Father Conrad Targonski, OFM, a retired Navy chaplain and now a campus minister at Viterbo University, was part of the team for that group—as he had been in 2013 for Trietley’s group. Father Conrad has now assisted with eight other veterans’ pilgrimages to Rome and Assisi.

He says that often the most moving events during the pilgrimage are the visit to the old cathedral, where Francis stripped off his clothes and returned them to his father, and the visit to Poggio Bustone, where Francis felt deeply forgiven.

“Some therapists,” says Father Conrad, “feel that post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] involves our bodies coming home before our souls do. This pilgrimage helps veterans rediscover their souls.”

Many veterans have been deeply moved by the parallels between Francis of Assisi’s military experiences and their own (for example, illness and PTSD). Encouraged by what Francis accomplished after his military service, they now see new possibilities for themselves. Trietley says, “It is now my goal to provide as many student veterans as possible with this life-changing opportunity.”

Dr. Bill Reese, a Vietnam veteran, Purple Heart recipient, and recently retired theology teacher at Viterbo, and Dr. Greg Masiello, a licensed psychotherapist, helped to lead the May 2018 pilgrimage. Dr. Paula Scraba, OSF, who is from a military family, works with student veterans at SBU.

viterbo.edu, sbu.edu, and FranciscanPilgrimages.com

University of St. Francis

Joliet, Illinois
Business as a Vocation

Dr. Anthony Zordan, a professor of accounting at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois, takes time during one accounting course to introduce students to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s 2012 document “Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection” (VBL). He references it in four other courses.

His own introduction to this dimension of accounting came through a conference at the University of Notre Dame and Michael Naughton and Robert Kennedy’s book, The Good That Business Does. Ironically, as the AFCU symposium was being held last June, Pope Francis was speaking with leaders of major oil companies about our shared moral responsibilities regarding climate change.

Jill Wagner, who took one of Dr. Zordan’s courses, says that she enjoyed reading VBL in class and discussing it with classmates. “This encouraged me always to be an honest, hardworking, and good employee and student.” Isabella Valentin adds that this document reminded her to stay true to her foundations and beliefs.

Amy Wegrzyn explains: “Using VBL was a nice way to see that even business has a part in God’s plan for us. I think it is important for future business students like myself to remember that our job in business is not only about making money but also providing our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ with useful goods and services to make their lives easier. Seeing our jobs as a vocation helps us see our purpose in life, which is to serve God and others through our unique talents and knowledge. In my case, that happens to be through the world of business.”

Fifteenth-century Franciscan Luca Pacioli probably could not agree more. Considered the father of accounting and the popularizer of double-entry bookkeeping, he advised accountants to begin their entries with “For the glory of God.” stfrancis.edu

Nuemann University

Franciscan Volunteer Ministry and the ‘No Risk, No Gain’ Programr
‘A Moment of Liberation’

In 2017 & 18, Franciscan Volunteer Ministry (FVM) offered six young people an opportunity to minister for 11 months with the Franciscan friars of Holy Name Province at St. Francis Inn and Ministries (Philadelphia) and St. Camillus Parish (Silver Spring, Maryland). A new site in Durham, North Carolina, has been added to the 2018-19 volunteer year.

St. Francis Inn serves breakfast three days a week and a sit-down meal 365 days a year for 200 to 400 people. Vol-unteers assist with cooking, preparing, serving, and, in some cases, delivering meals for those who cannot come to the inn. FVM participants also pick up donations, schedule daylong and weeklong volunteers, and coordinate all programming for children. Women volunteers assist at the inn’s women’s day center. The inn also has a clothing distribution center.

At St. Camillus Parish, FVM members assist at St. Francis International School. For the parish, they teach English as a second language, join in its youth ministry program, participate in local advocacy efforts, and help with the Meals on Wheels program.

The three core values of FVM members are intentional community, direct ministry, and expressed prayer. Volunteers are encouraged to eat together, pray together, and have fun together at least once a week. Each site has a friar supervisor.

For 10 months in 2017-18, FVM’s No Risk, No Gain program had three people working with the Franciscan Sisters of Philadelphia at Aquinas Center in that city, the Family Counseling Center of St. Paul’s in Wilmington, Delaware, and Red Hill Farm in Aston, Pennsylvania.

The No Risk, No Gain program, founded by the sisters in 2015, works with Franciscan Volunteer Ministry in presenting workshops at AFCU schools. The workshop can prepare for short-term service during spring break or a longer-term commitment. The AFCU’s June symposium in Joliet prompted several schools to request that workshop. Previous participants offered these comments:

“The way that discernment was explained and discussed was extremely helpful, deliberate, but still very lighthearted.”

“Franciscan service isn’t just about equality and justice.”

“It provides a moment of liberation, serving, and being served.”

“I appreciated being aware of what and why we are doing what we are doing—and the idea of equality vs. justice vs. liberation.”

“I appreciated talking about breaking down walls and seeing everyone as equals.”

Marian University

Indianapolis, Indiana
‘Taking My Relationship with Christ Seriously’

Only 39 percent of undergraduate students at Marian University in Indianapolis self-reported last September as Roman Catholic. To meet the needs of the remaining 61 percent, campus ministry there has created the Covenant Minister program that in the 2017-18 school year brought six volunteer ministers from local Christian churches to participate in ECHO (a Sunday evening worship service led by students and ministers), build relationships with students, and lead small-group discussion, and other spiritual activities. Non-Christian and unchurched students sometimes participate in other campus programs in which student leaders have been trained to welcome them where they are.

According to the Covenant Minister’s Code of Ethics, “Our major concern will be to aid the students in making informed choices concerning their religious lives, not to exclusively promote our own congregation, beliefs, or program.”

Student Willis Overton says: “The Covenant Minister program has had a huge impact on me in only the year that I have known them. The Covenant Ministers allowed me to feel comfortable to pursue my faith on campus. Whether meeting with Covenant Ministers individually or hearing them speak at ECHO, they have challenged and encouraged me to take my relationship with Christ seriously and make him the most important part of my life.”

Grace Neathery recalls: “I appreciate how the faith community at Marian recognized the need for reaching and supporting non-Catholic students. The people in ministry really care about the needs of the students. Even though my community of support wasn’t large, and I had to grow up a lot in my personal faith to be able to stand through some lonelier times, I always knew that I had people I could reach out to for help and support if I needed it. God worked in amazing ways in my life during my four years. I’m not the same Christian I was when I came, and I will always be thankful for the faithfulness of God and the people he brought into my life to continually support me.”

In summarizing his experience, Kessler Fisher says, “I was accepted just as I am and led to a faithful life where I have met God’s grace.”

Campus minister Theresa Roberts explains, “It brings me joy to know that, in addition to our Catholic worship and activities, students are being supported and strengthened in their Christian faith.” marian.edu

Padua Program

St. Bonaventure, New York
Deepening Franciscan Identity

When there were many Franciscan sisters, brothers, or priests working in a ministry, no one held the title mission integration officer or something similar. With the increasing popularity of the Franciscan vision and fewer vowed religious on ministry staffs, Franciscan religious communities have seen the need for a more formalized sharing of that vision with the laypeople who carry on those ministries with a dedication equal to that of those who founded them.

Between October 9 and 12 at St. Bonaventure University in New York, the 10-month Padua Program will begin with a conference to benefit those working to guarantee the Franciscan character of a particular ministry or those who may soon have that responsibility. Approximately eight online seminars will be offered before the concluding conference on the same campus (July 22–26, 2019). Individual mentors will work with participants and advise them on their project for this program. The Padua Program is a partnership between the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities and SBU’s Franciscan Institute.

Sister Margaret Carney, OSF, STD, president emerita of SBU, coordinates the program and is one of its resident presenters. The other two are Dr. Pauline Albert, PhD, and Father David Couturier, OFM Cap, PhD, DMin. The program will include several offsite speakers.

Jeff Papia, of Hilbert College, has assisted in the design of this program and will coordinate its seminars and the mentors’ activities. Sister Norise Kaiser, OSF, represented the Neumann community in designing this program.

While she was teaching business and management at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, Pauline Albert completed her doctorate in human and organizational systems (Fielding Graduate University) with a dissertation on the leadership of Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi. She says: “I have long believed that the power of the Franciscan legacy can transform institutions if leaders are willing to engage in its powerful message and spirit. The Padua Program will allow us to help many leaders enter into that same conviction and the practices that flow from it.”

Sister Margaret explains: “The Padua Program is a response to an increasing need to provide consistent professional development that grounds our administrative leaders in the Franciscan inheritance of their institutions. It can also serve as the seedbed of a national network of committed laypeople whose daily work is dedicated to Franciscan principles but who have as yet no structural connections beyond their own sponsoring groups.”

Presentations at the October conference are organized around three themes:

Francis and Clare: Overview and Relevance Today;

The Franciscan Family and the Catholic Church;

The Mission Officer’s Role, Responsibilities, and Challenges.

stbonavenue.com/events/certificate-program-for-mission-officers

The Padua Program and the five others described here show that Franciscan values are alive and well at Franciscan colleges and universities in the United States.

AFCU Overview

The Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities (AFCU) formally began on February 4, 1997, when 10 college presidents met at Washington Theological Union; its membership has since grown to 24 schools.

The AFCU supports Franciscan values in member institutions, provides a forum for dialogue, and fosters educational collaboration among its members.

Presidents of member schools meet annually, prior to the meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. The AFCU holds a three-day symposium in even-numbered years at a member school.

The AFCU also offers four online courses on Franciscan themes for faculty and staff at member schools. Many faculty and students have participated in Franciscan Pilgrimage Programs’ pilgrimages to Assisi, Rome, and other Franciscan sites.