Giving youth ears to hear

Father Bryce Sibley used to pick a spot on campus where he would sit behind a table with a sign welcoming passersby to “Ask a Priest a Question.”

For years, students of all religious backgrounds would stop at Father Sibley’s table at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and ask him something related to the Catholic faith. The conversations were usually respectful and edifying. That no longer really happens. 

“Tommy, can ya hear me?”

“Over the course of the past three to four years, people would have their earbuds in. They’d walk past and wouldn’t even want to make eye contact,” said Father Sibley, who has given up on that form of campus sidewalk evangelization.

“I tried last year to rekindle it, and it really wasn’t successful,” Father Sibley said. “Maybe I need more gimmicks or something. But a lot of times, I just find that the students are not as willing to engage as maybe they were 10 years ago.”

Evangelizing on college campuses – whether at Catholic universities or secular institutions – has long been a challenging task for Catholic chaplains, ministry leaders, campus missionaries and others because of the intense intellectual, personal-emotional, and social period of formation and transition that the college years are for most young adults.

But over the last decade, priests who work with young people and college-aged adults have noted a cultural shift that has complicated their efforts to accompany budding scholars and lead them to an encounter with Jesus Christ. They describe indifference and apathy to eternal truths gaining a stronger foothold in higher education settings. They also see a deep skepticism, if not outright hostility in some cases, to dialogue and debate.

Hearing out both sides

“A lot of kids today are scandalized by disagreements. They wonder if we can really arrive at the truth,” said Father Ruben Villareal, a priest of the Diocese of Lakes Charles, Louisiana who teaches college-level philosophy in a local Catholic high school.

Father Villareal, who is also the chaplain of Legatus’ Lake Charles Chapter, recalled a heated classroom discussion on a controversial topic last year where a student became emotional upon hearing different opinions expressed on the subject.

“Among many of my students, and they’re very perceptive of this,” Father Villareal said, “the number-one social sin is offending someone. The last thing you want to do is say something that might be perceived as homophobic, as racist, as sexist. It would hurt their little hearts if they offended someone even by telling them the truth.”

In a college town like Boston, often described as the Athens of America, young adults at Harvard, Boston College, Northeastern University, MIT, and elsewhere all feel the pressure to conform to modern social ideologies, said Father Eric Cadin.

“Certainly on major cultural topics, whether having to do with sexuality and gender identity, where a myopic ideological perspective is the only one tolerated, students feel that pressure, and that’s becoming more and more a challenge,” said Father Cadin, the director of university ministry for the Archdiocese of Boston.

Father Cadin, who also serves as chaplain for Legatus’ Boston Chapter, said those cultural factors make it difficult for ministries and for college students who feel that their embrace of traditional judeo-Christian values are barely tolerated, if at all, on campus.

“As the culture at large, and the culture on college campuses, becomes more and more hostile to genuine sacrifice, mortification, and virtue, it does become harder (for college students) to choose those on a natural level,” Father Cadin said.

Forming real friendships

The chaplains said evangelizing college students in this era will hinge less on crafting effective philosophical arguments and more on cultivating real friendships and authentic relationships with young people while modeling for them a joyful, integrated Christian life.

“Today, if you’re going to win a student over, there has to be a relationship,” said Father Sibley, the chaplain of Legatus’ Lafayette-Acadiana Chapter.

“A relationship has to be formed,” Father Sibley said. “There has to be someone who disciples or accompanies them, and they have to feel seen, known, and loved. That is what enables the students to really be able to accept the Word and for fertile ground to be created. If it’s just from preaching or from a talk they hear, a podcast they listen to, the seed is usually going to fall on rocky ground.”

With that kind of relational approach in mind, Father Sibley said the campus ministry team at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is employing a strategy where young lay missionaries will look to spend time and form friendships with students in their own elements, whether in a dormitory for engineering students or the Greek fraternity houses.

“It’s a matter of evangelizing and being present in those specific affinity groups, so that (the missionaries) become part of the scenes there, where they can bring others to Christ and to the sacraments of the Church,” Father Sibley said.

Seeing a life well-lived

Father Cadin, who works with an advisory group – which includes Legatus members – which evangelizes some 339,000 college students in the Archdiocese of Boston, emphasized his belief that a vibrant orthodox Catholicism lived well is compelling.

“Authentic Catholicism is always attractive,” Father Cadin said. “Yes, you have to find creative ways to be seen and heard, so students know you exist. But then you must welcome them into the treasures of the Church. Those are what students want because they’re true and they’re sources of grace.”

Even if more college students today are resistant to dialogue or debating uncomfortable subjects, Father Villareal said breakthroughs can still happen with some ingenuity and creativity. He described one philosophy exercise where he hid Oreo cookies in the classroom to illustrate that truth could be found through dialogue and reason in a similar way that the cookies could be discovered with a little bit of effort.

“There was a way to verify the proposition that there were Oreos in the classroom,” Father Villareal said. “The point was there was some way to have a dialogue or discussion, some form of examination of things to come to the point where they can say that some opinions are better, more sound than others.”

It’s also just as important for campus ministers and chaplains to be mindful of the relativistic cultural milieu that today’s college students have grown up in.

“The issues are so pervasive in the culture,” Father Villareal said. “They’re eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing (relativism) all day long. That was one reason why John Paul II said you need to use the same media culture to evangelize it, because that’s what they’re taking in everyday.”

While acknowledging the challenges, Father Sibley noted that there are also many Catholic students who arrive on university campuses every year and almost immediately get involved in campus ministry and the life of the local Church. More often than not, they were active back home in their own parishes or high school ministries.

“Those are the ones who come here and they’re leaders. They pray. They’re deep in their faith,” Father Sibley said. “While maybe families, generally speaking, are not doing all what they should be doing, there are a lot of parishes and Catholic high schools that are really out there evangelizing and catechizing, teaching their students to love Jesus and to lead others to Him.”

Brian Fraga is a Legatus magazine staff writer.