Saint Helena Church

“Remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do all that you do with love” – Saint Therese, The Little Flower

Most of the members of our Saint Helena’s Young Adult Group have a similar thread in their metanoia, or “ongoing conversion”, stories: We have eaten the fruit from the tree of the world, the flesh, and the Evil One: a fruit that looks good and delicious; however, when bitten into, is a spoiled and rotten fruit.

When we left high school, and with it many of our homely comforts and worldviews, we entered a world that can be compared to Frodo Baggins leaving the Shire and coming face-to-face with the evils of Mordor. Many of us attended universities where we were blindsided by anti-Catholic, anti-life, and anti-family principles. Largely unprepared and certainly ill-suited by the modern Catholic educational and catechetical institutions, we were knocked out in the first round without ever being able to throw a punch. The bumpers were removed from our metaphorical bowling lanes, and we rolled gutter balls.

Like Edgar Allan Poe’s the Masque of the Red Death, the world consumed many of us while we were comfortably tucked away in our respective universities naïvely enjoying the party lifestyle and all its dressings. As a result, most of our contemporaries and friends left the Catholic faith in their late teens and early twenties. Most will probably never return.

Attributed only to God’s grace and the Mystery of Predilection, some of us have begun to seek healing from our experiences and find solace in beauty, unity, truth, and goodness. Of course, the nature of the Catholic Church is these transcendentals. What starts out often as a lonely and humbling search for the Catholic faith by one young adult turns into a Emmaus-style walk where many young adults meet each other along the way and realize we have similar backgrounds and can journey together. This is the reason the Saint Helena Young Adult Group exists.

Based on the USCCB, our ministry to and with young adults seeks to accomplish the following goals:

• To connect young adults with Jesus Christ through spiritual formation/direction, religious education/formation, and vocational discernment. To connect young adults to the Church through evangelizing outreach, formation of the faith community, and pastoral care – Our young adult community offers bible studies, prayer meetings, faith formation,
• To connect young adults with the mission of the Church in the world through forming a Christian conscience, educating and developing leaders for the present and future.
• To connect young adults with a peer community through developing peer leadership and identifying a young adult team for the purpose of forming faith communities of peers.

Challenges

• Young adults have been captivated by the consumerism and materialism of the society in which they grew up and have became apathetic and cynical.
• Young adulthood is sometimes a world of boredom, disillusionment, and indifference to the Church.
• Young adults need a non-threatening place where they can freely express their questions, doubts, and even disagreements with the Church and where the teachings of the Church can be clearly articulated and related to their experience.
• Young adults make some of the most important decisions in their lives about their Christian vocation, their career, and their choice of spouse.