Greetings in Christ. My name is John Beaulieu and I am the Director of Youth Outreach for Franciscan University. In short, I am the person in charge of the programmatic aspects of the youth conferences co-sponsored by Franciscan University across the United States and Canada each summer.
I wanted to clarify what the pastoral guidelines and spirituality of the conferences are in order to help everyone understand better what our mission is and our goals are for our events.
First, though, I want to apologize for any confusion or fear that participating in our conferences has caused. Each summer, over 38,000 teens and their sponsors attend one of our 19 conferences and for the vast, vast majority of participants, the experience is one of faith awakening, conversion, and a deeper desire to love and serve the Church.
Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Most of the time when things do get out of hand or seem to cross the line from credible to over the top, it stems from unrealistic or overly hyped expectations placed on the teens from adult sponsors who tell them that the Adoration they experience at our conferences will be the greatest moment of their lives. I have overheard (and taken time to correct) chaperones who equate emotion with a spiritual response and wrongly push their teens to have an “emotional” experience.
I want everyone who has read or responded to the original post to understand that as a veteran with 20 years of youth ministry experience, as the director of the youth conference office for the past 5 years, and as a father of 5 (with a teen who attended his first conference this past summer), I would never tell a teen I was serving to prepare to have the most emotionally profound faith experience during Adoration. All you do is set the bar so high that the average teen (already quite emotional) will literally work themselves into an emotional frenzy trying to get there. And you set them up for defeat when they go back to their home parish and complain Adoration is boring because they didn’t “feel” anything.
With that being said, the official mission of the Franciscan University summer conferences is to bring young Catholics into a life-changing relationship with Christ through evangelistic preaching and the Sacraments of the Church. Our goal is to evangelize, to help each young person come to know the personal love of Christ as revealed on the cross and then get them connected to Jesus through Confession, the Holy Mass, and Adoration. I want to state this clearly because nowhere in our mission statement, or in my personal desire for that matter, is an agenda that could be described as “charismatic”.
That is not to deny or downplay the role the Holy Spirit and even the Charismatic Renewal in the 70s played in helping to form all that is good about Franciscan University and our summer conferences. But is not a main or even a secondary goal of the youth conferences to get teens to speak in tongues.
We call upon the Holy Spirit to empower the young people to be living witnesses of the gospel, to help transform them into the image of Jesus Christ. We ask the Holy Spirit to pour out gifts on the young people, but we focus on the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. We also focus on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. We verbally pray out loud in front of the young people, “Come, Holy Spirit.” I guess this is where some of the “danger” lies.
To pray, “Come, Holy Spirit” is to step out in faith and, most of the time, out of control. We do control the Holy Spirit. He should be moving in us and motivating US. We do not have control over the gifts God will bring when we ask Him to come. Some teens probably do receive the gift of tongues. Some probably do receive healing. But most of the time what teens receive is hope and a personal understanding that they are loved by the God of the Universe. And that is enough for them to keep walking. When teens encounter God and His infinite love, sometimes they have no words to express what is happening. Tears are the only response they can muster.
Be assured, none of the priests or hosts that help pastor these weekends encourage, manipulate or direct the teens to an emotional point. If anything, when these things happen, they try to take the young people back to a place of peace. This, as you can imagine is difficult when you have thousands of teens in one place. It is even more difficult if the sponsors and chaperones with the group are not taking control and actually pastoring their own teens.
Some of you may be wondering why we would call upon the Holy Spirit to come and bring His gifts if we were not on some level “Charismatic”. Well, simply put, the Church needs the Power of the Holy Spirit, young people need the Holy Spirit. It is no coincidence that the theme for Franciscan University’s summer conferences in 2008 was “Witness” and that the scripture was Acts 1:8. (I’ll let you look it up). This was the theme Scripture for World Youth Day as chosen by Pope Benedict XVI. In his message to the youth he stated,
“We are the fruits of this mission of the Church through the working of the Holy Spirit. We carry within us the seal of the Father’s love in Jesus Christ which is the Holy Spirit. Let us never forget this, because the Spirit of the Lord always remembers every individual, and wishes, particularly through you young people, to stir up the wind and fire of a new Pentecost in the world”. (Message for WYD, 2008)
We call upon the Holy Spirit NOT to create a movement within the Church. Rather, we are calling upon the Holy Spirit in order to give Him greater permission to work within our own hearts and within the Church.
I also have concerns about a chaperone who sees a teen screaming and would automatically assume it was demonic. It could be heat, dehydration, or simply a very broken and hurting young man. There is no doubt that Satan has this generation in His wicked cross hairs and he is hungry for young souls. But to make that sort of proclamation to young people without any sure sense is at best imprudent and at worse destructive.
As for other manifestations of the Holy Spirit, I think the best advice you can give a young person is if you desire a certain gift of the Holy Spirit or manifestation of the Holy Spirit MORE than a life of love and holiness and the personal consolation of the Holy Spirit, than your desires are skewed. When we get kids focused on an experience of a certain kind rather than on giving themselves more completely to Christ, then sometimes they will even fake it to either get attention or to “look holy” for their friends. Once again, these issues go beyond the weekend and back to the youth ministry environment that is discipling them long-term.
I wonder if the chaperones in question attended the session for sponsors where we discuss the evening sessions and their role in keeping the peace, and keeping the teens as calm as possible. Once again, I believe emotion can be the beautiful by-product of an encounter with God but can do more harm then good if they are being used to get teens to encounter God.
As for your own daughter, BlessedMomof2, keep listening to her and loving her through this. Pray with her. Let her know that not everything she saw or experienced at the conference during Adoration was necessarily God. But also assure her it wasn’t necessarily the devil. Let her know that the exact same Jesus, with the music and the procession, that she encountered at the Steubenville conference is the exact same Jesus that quietly waits for her in the tabernacle of your Church. Take her there so you and her can experience Christ together.
Please be assured of our ongoing prayers for all youth and youth ministers and especially the parents. If you want I can be contacted personally through the University or through the youth conference website. That address is
www.franciscanyouth.com.
I do apologize to all for a longer response to a long post.
Peace and blessings to all.
John
Originally Posted by BlessedMomof2 View Post
So, here are my questions:
- Steubenville - I guess I should have googled more before I let her go, they are charismatic, but are they “wrong”? Are they violating anything in our Church?
- should I have a discussion with the leaders and possibly bring in our parish priest?
- what documentation do I have to prove that this was wrong - and was it wrong? I know it doesn’t feel right. I prayed last night and every answer I got was that it wasn’t right. I kept getting more and more reasons in my head over and over why it wasn’t right. And I was led here to ask more I think.
So anyone have words of wisdom for me? I’m sorry this was so long. I’m not trying to debate the whole charismatic movement here. That’s not my intent. My intent is to make sure that my child is ok, that she is not afraid of God and that she is not being led down the wrong path.
