 I was in a faculty meeting in May with Father President, and he said it's now 2.45. The last exam, I think, is complete. It ended at 2.30. Can we officially say that we made it? At Franciscan University, we made it through the semester without having to shut down the university. So that was a bit of a victory. We've invited our conference guests to return to campus, and I'm extraordinarily happy to be with you. Thank you for those who have come the first time, but to see all my friends after the long break is a great consolation to me. So thanks for coming. Perhaps it may be time to reflect a little bit on our experience. But first, before we do that, I think we should remember and perhaps pray we have made it in many ways through a great trial, but we have also experienced great loss. For those of us here on campus, the crisis is still very close to home. Our friend, colleague, Ben Gessler, now fighting for his life. He serves in the development department. So yes, in many ways we're through it, but in many ways the challenges are still with us. So if you would join me in prayer, please, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your great kindness to us and bringing us back to the St. John Bosco conference and through a very difficult and dark time for our world. But we pray for those who have paid the ultimate price, those who have gone before us, those who have died. We pray for those who are sick and struggling. We pray for those who are caring for them, for those who are still in real danger. We pray for those who continue to make difficult decisions about how we are to proceed as we continue to open up. We pray for those who have survived but have suffered loss in so many ways. We ask you to restore to them all that was lost, to bring your healing hand upon us, and to grant us your vision for how we proceed from here. We pray all these things in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit, amen. I wanted to just give you an outline of where I hope to take you tonight, and I'll figure out the, there we go. Here's the outline so you know where we'll go in with the time that we have ahead of us. A bit of a new perspective. We emerge from the pandemic, not completely out of it, but so many have shared with me the new perspective and the blessings that we've seen the Lord provide for us in that time. We ask what the church does during a pandemic. Certainly she shuts down mass in some places and cares for the sick in many heroic ways, but she also produces the directory of 2020. The focus of the directory then is our new evangelization which in many ways is not so new. I'd like to take a look at what is not so new and what is different, and in many ways it's the audience. So we have a new audience to reach, a large audience to reach, and as I tell my students, a lot of job security, right? Because there are many still affected and many, many to reach. That leads us to the last point is a not so new priority for our work or the work of advancing the kingdom in the catechetical field. So from the new perspective, I wanted to give my perspective a little bit. A few years back, I was setting the schedule. I think it was the event that triggered it was my daughters or my second son's graduation from high school, and I started looking ahead, like a dad I suppose does, at what we had facing us in the next, when were the next graduation round was going to come. What I found was that 2020 was going to be a pretty big year for us, so much so that I wasn't quite sure how I was gonna get through it all. Before that, I want to take a step back. Gary did us the favor of giving us a little bit of history. My history was, it was July 1997. I just graduated from Franciscan University in the master's program, and I was hired by the university to help Barbara with the writing projects that she had. She wanted me to complete, what I hadn't completed at that point was the catechetical certification that really was at the heart of what she brought to the university. So on the Tuesday, after my graduation, I began taking a course in scripture the heart of catechetics from Dr. Steven Militech, and after that, in July, I was taking a course in philosophical foundations of catechetics taught by Dr. Rhonda Chirvin, who had written the text for the course with Monsignor Eugene Kavan, who had been a great mentor to Barbara, to Dr. Militech, to Sister Johanna, and much of his vision for catechesis formed the basis of what we did in forming catechists at Franciscan University. I was in one of the basement classrooms of this building taking the course during the second edition of the St. John Bosco Conference, and my classmates each day would come down, they were working the conference, working with Barbara, and they would interrupt me in class and say, Barbara needs you. She needs you to meet this speaker. She needs you to see this presentation. She needs you to talk about this course, and each time I'd have to get out of class and I'd come up and I said, after a few of these, I said, Barbara, I'm time to take a class from one of your friends, one of the people that you brought in to teach this. That's all right, I made it through the course. The week after I completed that course and participated in the second edition of the St. John Bosco Conference, my first child was born. So I had, from that point on, due to the timing of the St. John Bosco Conference, which I've been attending for 24 years, I missed my son's birthday every year. There's a couple of exceptions because in 2020, he was to graduate from college. Not only was he to graduate from college, his younger brother was to finish his studies at Franciscan University before transitioning to the completion of his engineering degree at Notre Dame. So I had a Franciscan graduation, a Notre Dame graduation. His younger sister was to graduate from high school in the spring of 2020. His twin siblings were to graduate from junior high in the spring of 2020. His younger sister was to be confirmed in the spring of 2020. And his youngest brother was to receive his first communion in the spring of 2020. And when I figured out all of that, I said, Lord, how am I gonna do all of that? We do some teaching here. And not to be left out, his one remaining sister, who didn't have a graduation on the horizon was hoping to pass her driver's test. We had appointment with the Cones of Destiny and I must say that in addition to all those celebrations, which we did, which we celebrated on a much smaller scale with family all present and social distancing, we celebrated yesterday morning. Some of you may have seen my youngest two children who got confirmed and received first communion one year ago yesterday. We stopped for donuts before we came over here to celebrate that great event. And I said to the Lord, well, this must be the answer to the question about how are we going to do that spring 2020 thing? Am I the only one that needed a little bit of a break in 2020? Am I the only one who saw the Lord working in such ways that I never saw that coming? There was much tragedy in 2020 and in the midst of that tragedy, God was present and God was working, working over time. I want to share with you just one small silver lining. It was what I call the graduation that I did not expect. Before the pandemic shut everything down, this would have been in the fall of 19, and my father's health was declining, not associated with the pandemic at all, but more rapidly than we had expected. And it caused me some concern, not only to lose my father, but I had a big spring in front of me and I said, are you really going to do that to me as well? How would it be that I would be able to be attend to the passing of my dad who was ready but something that you could not really prepare for? And I think God had one more graduation in mind for the spring of 2020. One, of course, that I did not anticipate. God arranged it. He sent my students home. We sent all the students home. Actually, they were already home. It was spring break. We just invited them not to come back, right? And so I had the opportunity to take my laptop to continue to teach my students from my father's bedside. And hospice made it possible for him to be at home when so many that we know were not able to have any visitors at all in their sickness. And my mother was a nurse and my sister is a nurse and hospice was happy to wash their hands and not come to our house and they deputed my mother and sister to everything dispense any medicine that he had. And I was able to teach my courses from my father's bedside and harken back to the day before I came to Franciscan University when I served a year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps taking care of the terminal ill as a hospice home health aide. I inspired by my sister in the work that she had done. And I never imagined being able to care for my father in his last days. And so it was that on Holy Saturday of 2020, dad died while we who were in vigil slept. And that night at the celebration of the Easter vigil, my celebration of Easter was never more real. To know that he has risen, that he has conquered death, made that celebration of Easter unique for me. And I must say I worked with Barbara. I've been to a lot of Easter vigils. I've been at Franciscan University and I've brought a lot of people into the church thanks be to God. I've been to some pretty good celebrations of the resurrection, but nothing like I did in 2020. A few months later on the grass hill outside of Finnegan Fieldhouse, I celebrated Pentecost at Franciscan University. We tend to go overboard a little bit with Pentecost at Franciscan University. But for us here, it was the first time in three months that we were able to go to mass outdoors and receive the Lord again. I've been to exciting Pentecost, but none like that that I will ever forget. To be with my family, to be with my colleagues again and to receive the Lord again. The pandemic has caused many difficulties, but has given us a new perspective on life, on death, and the work that the Lord has entrusted to us. And my perhaps the only one who gained a new appreciation for the presence of our Lord in the Eucharist, thanks to having to do without it for so long. And so we thank God for the new perspective he has provided for us. And we look forward to what he has in store from here on out. Oh, that's my, that was my punchline. The not all unprecedented, I was having great conversation at dinner. This was the fruit of our graduation this year, which was again, was rather record breaking. The record breaking number of graduates, but we had as a graduation speaker the former secretary for labor, Eugene Scalia, also the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. And to our graduating class, he says, yes, it's been an unprecedented year, but as my father used to say, in the big scheme of things, not all that unprecedented. I mean, certainly in my lifetime, this was rather unprecedented. Saw some things, did some things, never done before. But he says, yeah, this has been rough, but the church has seen much worse. Of course, then he brought up the bubonic plague, right? So we were shut down. We've been shut down for a year plus. We had to figure out for our students who had to go into isolation. We had to get food down there somehow. But they were staying in hotel rooms. That was our isolation dorm. And our, not only isolation, but we also had to quarantine those who might have been exposed. He said, you know, back, bubonic plague, I think they were shut down for about 50 years before we got through that. They didn't send you to a hotel. They sent you home if they thought you might have been exposed. Then they'd come back a few days later to see if you were still alive, right? So what does the church do during the pandemic? We have a history of heroes, our saints who showed us how it's done. I don't know if you've seen St. Vincent de Paul, Monsieur Vincent, the beautiful movie that, The Black and White, where they were rather shut down. He showed up, they closed the doors, they threw rocks at him, but he went. He met the sick, he buried the dead, and he won them back. Our history is full of that. I think it was our own painter at St. Francis. What changed his life? Embracing the leper. That I recommend you go out and embrace those who have COVID right now unless you've been fully vaccinated, then go for it, right? So what about St. Damien of Molokai? Send me to the leper colony. This is nothing new for the church. I came across a new one I was teaching from the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults. And there was the testimony of St. John Newman, not to be confused with John Henry Cardinal Newman, but St. John Newman, the Bishop of Philadelphia. This is how the close of his life read. I don't know if you're familiar with this. While he was on his way to minister to the sick at a hospital, he collapsed from sheer exhaustion on the street and died. This is what the saints did. If they were with us today, and we've seen many of them in our own presence, those who are on the front lines, many of you have been on the front lines. I think the saints would say to us, pandemic, put on your mask, bring it on. All right, let's do what we are called to do and meet the needs of our brothers and sisters. And those who answer the call to the catechetical work are in a unique position to meet the greatest needs, the greatest spiritual needs that our audience still suffers from and will continue to suffer for many years to come. So it is a new perspective and the right response with a new perspective comes from those who have gone before us, the saints who set the way for us today. Frank Sheed wasn't canonized, but I think he articulated the perspective the best. He was speaking about the greatest underutilized spiritual force in the church today. I had to adjust my lectures because for those of my students, you know what the greatest underutilized spiritual force in the church today, at least according to me, has been. Anybody answer me what that is? You remember? Nobody's got it. I can barely see your hands, but I always said it was LOLs that the new technology is taken from me, but my pastor would never undertake a new initiative without getting the little old ladies, the greatest underutilized spiritual force in the church to ensure that they were taking his needs to our Lord and our Lady. Anyway, Sheed trumped me on that with this one. He was speaking about guardian angels. Guardian angels have been working kind of over time during the pandemic, I think. Have you appreciated yours lately? Anyways, this is the way he put it. We know from our Lord's words that every angel has, every child has an angel to guard him and it is the universal teaching of theologians that this is so not only of children, but of all. And yet we seldom turn to them for help. We tend to forget about angels simply because they are spirits. Matter is not so easy to overlook. Angels can nourish our bodies. No, angels can nourish our minds as cows nourish our bodies. And we are more solicitous for the nourishment that cows give, especially after the dinner that we had in any case. Fallen angels can damage our souls as microbes are bodies. And we are more on guard against microbes. And sanity demands that we correct this strange defect in our seeing. For me it's kind of the holy water hand sanitizer thing and we lost the holy water, I understand. I missed it. I understand why we had to put the hand sanitizer. I'm really glad that the holy water is back. But am I the only one whose mind had ever crossed that I think we need the holy water more than we need the sanitizer, right? Well now we got them both. What is it that we fear more? The threats to the body which are many and great or the threats to the soul which are the unique purview of those who advance the mission of the church in catechesis. Thank you for what you have done and what you will continue to do. It's clearly not over and we have our work cut out for us. So what does the church do during the pandemic besides take the mass away from us? But they give it back, thank you. Cares for the sick, which they've done rather heroically takes care of those in need which you've contributed to her ability to do that. And yes, she launches a new directory. I want to do one more little piece of history on the directory before I say a few words about what the vision of the church has for us with the directory of 2020. So you remember back in July 1997 I was in that class downstairs a couple weeks later my son was born. A few months before that my wife came into the church was received into full communion in this room. Thanks to Barbara Morgan. When she came here, I was a student and she was kicking and screaming or something along those lines. I had no interest in becoming Catholic until she met Barbara Morgan who really loved her into the church. We celebrated her communion with the church, my graduation and the birth of our first child 1997 was a pretty big year for us. What happened in 97? This is where I always get my students. Yeah, the church gave us a directory. The general director for catechesis, the revision of the 1971 general catechetical directory and I thought it was really kind of the church to recognize my graduation with a gift like that. I mean, there was a little bit of a difficulty because Barbara had trained us to use the general catechetical directory and because we were students of Barbara we had to memorize all the article numbers that were for the important passages there and I had gotten them pretty well and I had passed the tests and now I had a new directory to deal with. It was a nice graduation present but it meant a lot of work to sort that out. After a year at the university I was hired by the Diocese of Peoria. The first task that the bishop sent me on was to attend a conference on the newly published general directory for catechesis that was overseen, it was in San Francisco overseen by Archbishop Levada who had served under Cardinal Ratzinger in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before he was Archbishop of San Francisco and when Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict the 16th Archbishop Levada took over his position as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. At that conference, thank you, at that conference I also had the opportunity to meet Archbishop Daniel Beekline of Indianapolis whose articulation of the deficiencies in catechetical materials again has been pivotal for the formation of our students here at Franciscan University. The book that Gary mentioned that I had a hand in at a certain point I also mentioned to Archbishop Beekline and he looked me in the eye and he said write that book. I'm extraordinarily grateful for the contribution that the sisters have made so that that project, long coming project has come to fruition. After I returned from the conference the first task that the bishop gave me was to coordinate a conference for the entire diocesan staff on the vision of the general directory for catechesis and how all of our work would be reoriented catechetically. I'm like I'm the new guy on the diocesan staff and you want him to tell them that they're all working for me now or something along those lines. Fortunately he was behind this effort. The bishop saw the priority outlined in the directory and was committed with his whole being to accomplishment. And so since 1997, in six years in the diocese and the last 17 years here the great privilege of teaching the students sent to us by the Lord to be prepared for the catechetical work. The focus of my work has been implementing the general directory for catechesis. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that effort has borne any fruit. But what I do know is that it's 2021 and we have a new directory. And I'm wondering 20 years from now what will you say about the year 2020? Was it the year of the global pandemic or was it the year that we got the directory of the church? That's the year when we got the vision and began to turn this thing around. We have the general catechetical directory and the general directory for catechesis and if you thought it was difficult to keep those straight the church just simplified it. We've got the DC, the directory for catechesis. Either that or the directory for coronavirus I don't care what you think of it as. All I'm saying is for 20 years from now I hope you're here in the seats at the St. John Bosco Conference and we can look back and say 2020, yeah, I remember that. We got the directory. We've been implementing it ever since. Are you with me? It's time. I always wondered was it a coincidence that we got a new directory in 2020 or was it just really good timing? The church knows what she's doing. Sometimes the Lord just has to shut things down in order to get us, get our attention and do something different. We knew that the directory for catechesis was coming. Our own beloved sister Johanna was working with a team and had advanced copies of it. I must say for selfish reason I wasn't all that happy that it was coming. Mostly because then I knew I had to redo all my article numbers for my classes, update my classes and then I also knew that if it came and I still wanted to use that story about the church giving us the general directory for catechesis in honor of my graduation I'd have to get the dissertation submitted and get it on track. And so it was a year ago I submitted and the last month I graduated and I thought it was really nice of the church to give us a directory in honor of my graduation. I'm gonna see if I can jump in with my friends who have been advancing this for me. I wanna talk a little bit about the directory but I have to talk about the catechism first. In one of the lectures that I would give that I've had to update now, I got through it, it was all right, there was a directory in 71 and then there was a directory in 97 and the question was why a new directory? What happened between 71 and 97 that necessitated that we needed to have a new one and have to learn all those new article numbers? It was the catechism of the Catholic Church given to us again, Archbishop Schoenberg's editorial work and his bringing it here and blessing the church with it at the request of the bishops. But that was really the motivation. The general directory for catechesis of 97 was the vehicle by which the catechism was implemented and if I'm gonna talk about the directory, I know, good golly, we've had the directory for catechesis, it's been in English for about a year now. You all got the first copy that was available. You didn't even have to have sister's embargoed copy but I think she still has it and she might show it to you if you're nice to her. But you've read it, you've embraced it, you've memorized all the article numbers and you're ready to implement it. Well, just in case you haven't done that yet, I'll talk a little bit about the directory but for the rookies in the audience, perhaps. But what is the directory? I'll start that with the question, what is the catechism? The two are related. In fact, general directory 120 will say they are distinct but complementary instruments. What's the catechism? It's that book with all the teachings and it's an instrument of torture and the catechism majors is what it is, mostly around here. But here we have the content of the faith summarized and trusted to the church that the church has spent 2,000 years preserving and entrusting to others. It is the content of what we teach. It is the what of catechesis. So if the catechism is the content or the what of catechesis, I'm going to say that the directory is the how. So the relationship between the two is the catechism is the what and the directory is the how. Perhaps an oversimplification but you'll bear with me because good golly is getting late at night and we've been up for a long time, right? So I, what's that? Give me direction. The what, did I get the right slide? The what, the how, the who and the who. All right, the who and the who. So we'll go one step further. The directory is the how of catechesis but it's also the who, the audience and also the catechists. So the church in her vision provides for us how to deliver the faith. The who, the catechist in their formation. For example, an explanation of the God's pedagogy of revelation and the response of faith, how God teaches and the who, the audience. These are the ones we're dealing with. The primacy of the catechesis of adults. Inculturation, teaching an audience of many different backgrounds or teaching people who seem to be from other planets like teenagers and stuff, all right? So the directory is going to help us sort out the how, the who and the who. And from there I wanna direct my comments in that regard. Before I do that though, the context, the focus of the directory for catechesis. If we step back, if you look at the 71 directory or I could ask you how many directories do we have? So many directories in so little time. The 1971 directory, I think the church gave that to us in honor of my graduation from kindergarten but I don't remember too well. The focus of the general catechetical directory was really the Second Vatican Council. In fact, it was commissioned by the council that even more than a catechism, we needed a directory. And so the driving force was the implementation of the council for the general catechetical directory. I've already mentioned that the driving force behind the general directory for catechesis was the implementation of the catechism. And so certainly between 1997 and 2020, something's happened. What is it that's happened? All I do know is that in 97 I had a new baby and then in 2020, he graduated from college. So something obviously has changed. But what is it that instigated or inspired or necessitated a new directory in 2020? Ostensibly, it was the synod on the new evangelization of 2012 and Evangelium Gaudium of 2013, the new evangelization as it were. This is the church's vision again for meeting the needs of an audience that has been previously Christianized. And we'll talk a little bit about that, but the new evangelization is distinct from the evangelization agentes to the nations to the unchurched. Before I do that, I want to put into context what it is, the vision that the directory provides for us. So this is the audience participation slide. So what I'm gonna do is a little bit of a drill. So we got three directories, three visions of the church. This is not a test, this is only your response and give you an opportunity to say something. Raise your hand if you think this was from the 71 directory, raise your hand if you think this is from the 97 directory, raise your hand if you think this is from the 20 directory and we'll jump through a couple of these. That was my, the three directories. Let me see if I can jump ahead here. Believers in our time are certainly not in all respects like believers of the past. This is why it becomes necessary to affirm the permanence of the faith and to present the message of salvation in renewed ways. 71, 97, 2020. All right, good. Pluralism, as it's called, is no longer views and is evil to be eliminated, but rather as a fact which must be taken into account. Anyone can make his own decisions known without becoming or being regarded as alien to society. So everybody can have their view, we're open to all of those. 71, 97, 2020. Yeah, sounds like 2020, right? Many feel that God is less present and less needed and God seems to them less able to explain things in both personal and social life. The Christian faith is experiencing a crisis of this source among its followers. It has an urgent duty to show forth its newness and cultures that have been secularized and desacralized. 71, 97, 2020. All right, you get the idea. Now however, human progress and the instruments of social communication are having this effect. Faulty opinions are being spread abroad with greater speed and are exerting an ever wider influence among the faithful. Young adults especially who suffer grave crisis and are not infrequently driven to adopt ways of acting and thinking that are hostile to religion. 71, 97, 2020. Ah, there we're jumping in. All right, you're getting familiar. Great numbers are drifting little by little into religious indifference or something close to atheism. 71, 97, 2020. All right? And I think this is the last one. Thank you for bearing with me. The Kedaketical renewal ought to use the help which can be given by especially the social communications media. 71, 97, 2020. The answers. 1971, 1971, 1971, 1971, 1971, 1971, 1971, 1971. You win? Get there with the prize. Get the prize over here. Thank you for bearing with me on that. I hope it made the point that I wanted to make is the problem is not new. All of this seen and visioned by the church in the Second Vatican Council 50 years ago. I mean, most of my students go through a drill like that and say, you mean we haven't fixed this yet? And there is that disappointment here. The point is the crisis that we're facing is not a new crisis. There are some things that are new about this work. But what we're facing today, which many of you thought was just a recent thing, this has been the challenge that we've been facing for a long time. I think I put that in there just to give you that impression, but also to say that I think it's time we have to do this differently. There's that line from the imitation game. This war that we're in, we're not winning it. It's time to do something differently. And the church, with the Lord's help, has shut everything down, given us a directory, given us the vision. So that 20 years from now we'll look back and say, that's when we got the vision that helped us turn this thing around. Are you with me? Yes, amen. What has changed? Who wrote the Director for Catechese, General Catechetical Directory was the Congregation for the Clergy? Who wrote the General Director for Catechesis in 1997? You have the General, or the Congregation for the Clergy. Who wrote the Directory for Catechesis? There we go, thank you. We can go to the next one. The Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization. What's different here is that the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization is a new author. The church went through the trouble of establishing a new Pontifical Council in order to address this particular issue. So it's the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, which we just found out is not all that new. And it is not writing a document on Promoting Evangelization. It's not the General Director, it's not the Congregation for the Clergy writing about the New Evangelization. It's the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, writing a document about Catechesis. Catechesis says as if the church is saying, you haven't been paying attention, evangelization must be the priority within the context of our Catechetical work. Catechesis must always be housed in the broader context of evangelization. So the author is new, and I think that gives us the priority. That's, let's see, how are we going to do this differently? The how? We're gonna have to do it differently. Really? Differently. Yeah, differently. Really differently. I don't like to do things differently. I prefer just to do the talks. We did the last time we came to the Bosco Conference. I want to teach the same courses. I don't want to update my lectures. I don't want to learn all those new numbers. We're gonna have to do this different. Really? Differently? Yeah, I think we're gonna have to do it differently. I'm the track coach for the local summer track league. And whenever we got another track meet this weekend, and whenever I'm trying to figure it out, I'm like, just do what we did last year. And they all look at you funny and they say, we didn't do this last year. And I'm like, you're right, okay. None of us did this last year, all right? It's time to say, well, we got rid of the masks for the most part. Monsignor said he put the Pew dividers in the museum, and we're not gonna pull those out. When are we gonna get back to normal? Not anytime soon. We're gonna have to do this differently. Sometimes in order to do things differently, you kind of have to shut it down and start over again. So I wanted to say a little bit about Franciscan University deciding to do this thing differently. Yes, you're gonna have to go to a Zoom meeting. Yes, you're going to have to learn how to record your lectures. Yes, you're going to have to learn how to post your recorded lectures to the Blackboard Learning Management System. And yes, you're going to have to learn how to grade papers electronically. No, you can't write a check for that anymore. No, you can't submit your taxes on paper anymore. No, you can't sign up that way anymore. No, you can't pay that way anymore. Am I the only one that's feeling kind of old these days? Maybe I'm not the only one. I remember Barbara had to propose something for the Institute and they made her do a PowerPoint. I mean, she was still doing stuff on, you know, the sisters had to type her stuff in and the board made her do a PowerPoint. So she recruited all of us. We're not getting back anytime. So the church or the university had this little bit of a difficulty. I don't know if the students are gonna come back in the fall of 2020. So somebody had the brilliant idea. Why don't we give away free tuition, pack as many students onto campus as possible, and figure it out? Sounds like a good idea. Because there would be this gap in our enrollment if the students didn't come back. It sounds like a pretty good idea, right? If you were thinking of taking advantage of her, it's over, you missed it. Sorry, no more free tuition. But when the conference office says we're gonna do the Bosco Conference this year, we're gonna bring people back to the campus. I said, hey, remember that step in faith thing? Seemed to work for us. Why don't we just give everybody free admission, free registration to the St. John Bosco Conference? We'll pack them in and we'll figure out how to do this. They laughed at me. I tried, but they made you pay registration anyways. We're gonna have to do this differently. Of course, getting them back onto campus, I mean, we were packed. I kept waiting for them to tell us to say we're gonna cut off admissions and we just don't have room for anymore. Austria, our campus in Austria was shut down and we always depend on that to send so many of our students there. We don't have enough dorm space for them here. That was shut down, so we had to absorb those students. Now they just kept taking as many students as possible and we filled up hotel after hotel after hotel and the class size had to be smaller for social distance so we had to multiply the number of seconds for this incoming class. Yeah, we're gonna have to do this differently, I think. And that's what we had to learn. We're going to have to learn the technology. We're going to have to reach an audience that's not able to come here. And like it or not, we've done that a little bit. We're going to have to get them back to campus. We can do catechesis remotely, but you can really make disciples more effectively if they show up. And lastly, we're going to have to accommodate the audience in ways that we've never had to accommodate them before. And that, I think, takes us, how are we going to do this? We're gonna have to do it differently. To who? The audience. What is the audience of the new evangelization? I would say the difference between evangelization and catechesis was because they recruited me to teach foundations of the Catholicism. Now, I've been spoiled. I've been teaching catechetics courses during my tenure here. And the difference between catechetics 204 and theology 101 is the difference between catechesis and evangelization because catechetic students want to learn how to teach the faith. They're happy for everything that you give them. I know you don't always see this audience, but it's really cool teaching here. They'll take anything, they'll feed us more. And then we had so many freshmen that I had to teach theology 101. And I had no longer did I have catechetics majors. I had a few here and there who were my champions. I survived with them. But I had no more catech majors. I had business majors, nursing majors, engineering majors, undeclared majors, video game majors, social media majors, soccer majors. I think I'm gonna have a different audience here. When we say that we're going to accommodate the audience, we're taking on the response of the Lord, which is go and find my sheep, right? So I had this vision for this when I was in grade school. I went to the Catholic school and my buddies who went to the public school would tell us the horror stories of the drug heads, the kids that would just terrorize everybody. One day we found out that one of the worst of these bullies was kicked out of the school, kicked out of the public school. And then the rumor started spreading that he was gonna attend Little St. Robert's grade school and like how is this gonna happen, right? So you could put a tire on that kid's neck, but we're still scared because he's gonna terrorize us just like anybody else. But I came from the generation when 50% of the faculty was religious sisters still. My parents' generation was 100% was religious. My children's generation are 0% religious. I had about 50-50 and whenever one of these thugs would get into trouble, the parents would come to Sister Theophane and say, oh, my little angel is so abused, they've kicked him out of the school again. Would you take him? And I don't know if Sister Theophane was tricked in any sense of the word, but she had a vision for why the school existed, not that I liked it at all, but she would embrace the lost sheep of the public school. She would embrace every thug and every bully because that is the mission of Jesus Christ entrusted to her, to which she entrusted her life. And it is our mission as well. You might say, well, they're not really so much lost. I mean, they do manage to show up. They're just really mean, right? So whenever you have this disposition to present itself, it is no more time for catechesis. It is time, how can I figure out how I can get this person to like me, right? So I was doing a workshop with school teachers. They asked me to do moral life. I'm not sure why they did that, but I did my best catechesis on sin. And they said, they started, I proposed to them that discipline within the context of a loving relationship was what was necessary for the child who was in difficulty. And their response was, you mean we're not the bad guys? And I said, you have to give them structure and discipline to rein in the difficulties that they're facing. And they said, you mean we're not the bad guys when we give them discipline? I said, no, that's the most loving thing you can do for the child who hasn't had the experience of loving discipline. And that was like a new vision for them that the best thing for the wayward child, the ones who caused the most difficulty was to be the disciplinarian, but the disciplinarian who loved them. I'll never forget the reaction when the discussion went down. They told many stories of Jacinta, the most difficult student that any of them had ever countered. And the parents who made the child that way as well and how they had to deal with it. And after the discussion, the reflection of one of the teachers was, I mean, eventually there were so many problems with this child that she had to be sent away. And the response of the teacher after our discussion was, we didn't love Jacinta enough. We didn't love her enough. It's so easy to think of the students as our difficulties, as their parents is the most difficult part of our job, the parents who made them that way. But it's let us ask the Lord to give us a heart for this growing audience that's not just lost, that's making their way into our situations, and let us learn to have that heart to love them. It's so much more fun to win them than to beat them. And so it is, one more point that I will make here is the not so new priority that allows us to operate in this situation. This is the time when those students who have graduated, who have entered the missions, are coming back to raise their financial support. I don't know if you've had them begging from you professionally at all, but they're a very touching story. One of my students was, had joined Mission, and she was entering the field just as everything was shutting down. And so she bemoaned the fact that here she had committed her life to the Lord to give the opportunity to put her training to work. And the Lord arranged for all of it, she was to serve at a camp that took on prospective disciples. And all of it was shut down. I've given a year of my life, I've spent the greater part of the last several months begging for money, I mean fundraising for my expenses, in order to give retreats and host camps, and now the camp has shut down. The governor won't let us open. And the response of the director to her concern was, you might think that you are here to do ministry, to serve others, to teach and to counsel, and to make disciples. But that, Martha, is not primarily why you are here. You are here to draw near to the Lord and to do what he wants you to do. If you think that you can do any of those things without doing this thing, you can beg and give your life all you want, but you will not necessarily bearing fruit for the kingdom. God has arranged for us to be here. God has arranged for our disciples not to come. He sent them home. We love them, we miss them, but they're not here to distract us anymore. Perhaps he has something for us to say, for us to do. Let us go and find out. Lord, do you not care that my pastor, my parish, my parishioners, my family have left me to do and run this program? Tell them to help me. And the Lord said to her and replied, Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her. Sisters named tags that say, don't talk to me, are still available. If you've missed the opportunity during this shutdown to go to the Lord, as my student did, when none of the campers come and to receive a new vision and new direction from him, there's still time. You're here. You've come to the shores of the beautiful Ohio River. You're anxious about many things. There's only one thing that's necessary. Have you taken opportunity to do that one thing, to sit at the feet of the Lord and listen to what he wants you to do? This is not your program. This is not your work. These are not your disciples. All of them are the Lord's. And if you think you can help them without being close enough to him to know what he wants you to do for them, you won't necessarily advance the kingdom. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part. It will not be taken from her. Do not be anxious. There is still time. You are here. This is a good place and time to attend to the one thing necessary. We will send you home on Thursday and you can be Martha all you want. In fact, her feast is coming up on the 29th of this month and you can celebrate it with great relish. But in the meantime, let us gather together to sit at the feet of the Lord and do the one thing that is really necessary. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So then my beloved obedientness, you have always been not only when I am present, but all the more now that I am absent, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For God is the one who for his good purpose works in you both to desire and to work. Do everything without grumbling or questioning that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine like lights in the world as you hold on to the word of life so that my boast for the day of Christ might be that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to be here. Please bless these your disciples, these your catechists, these your teachers, these your children. Draw them ever closer to you. Bless the work that they do at your service to advance the kingdom. We pray all these things in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, amen. In the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, amen. Thank you very much.