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Touches on pope's childhood, and renewing the faith

Sunday, October 20, 2002

By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Teaching young people to stand up for life and faith in a culture of death and despair was a running theme at yesterday's Total Catholic Education Conference at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

The conference, sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, drew more than 5,000 educators.

Papal biographer George Weigel spoke on the experiences of the young man who became Pope John Paul II as he stood up to nazism and communism.

One of the great themes of John Paul's pontificate is his warning of a global clash between a culture of life and a culture of death. Although those are often identified by issues such as abortion or genocide, what separates them is whether the culture has absolute respect for the God-given life and rights of the individual person, Weigel said.

"Involvement in building the culture of life must permeate the entire church, including Catholic education," he said.

Building that culture starts with strengthening the family, because that is where people "learn that everyone is to be accepted, respected and loved, precisely because he or she is a person," he said.

But secular culture tears away at the family through trivializing sexuality and, consequently, rejecting new lives that are created through promiscuous conduct, he said.

"Catholic education must challenge the sexual revolution," Weigel said. "There is no true freedom, the pope writes, where life is not welcomed and loved."

John Paul rejoices in the opportunities for demoracy that have replaced Marxist governments, Weigel said. But he is concerned that democracy is often considered as value-neutral. He remembers that Nazism rose from a democratic post-World War I Germany because that democracy did not value or safeguard the rights of individual human beings, Weigel said. He believes that millions of people died under nazism and communism because both degraded the value of the individual human person.

A workshop on "evangelizing the baptized through spiritual multiplication," featured Curtis Martin, founder of a ministry to Catholic university students. He spoke of how he fell away from the faith in high school without realizing it.

"I lived the MTV lifestyle and lived a double life as a Catholic. I didn't, in some ways, understand the disconnect. I lived a lifestyle totally in conflict with what Christ was asking of me. Yet my parents were youth ministers, I was an altar boy."

In college he stopped attending church, but soon began to realize that his party lifestyle brought him no satisfaction. He began to read the Bible that his mother had insisted he take with him. Soon afterward he was approached by students in the evangelical Protestant ministry Campus Crusade for Christ, who invited him to a Bible study. Later, they encouraged him to lead a Bible study.

Through them he renewed his commitment to Christ, which eventually led him back to the Catholic Church. But their method of campus ministry became a model for his Fellowship of Catholic University Students. Since 1997 it has grown from 20 students to 2,000, with 50 staff members. Of those students, 30 have entered seminary, 10 have entered convents and dozens have married, he said.

The goal of his ministry is to educate students in the faith so that they soon begin to pass it on to others, who then begin to pass it on to others. Their goal must be to educate the heart as well as the mind, he said.

"We are not just imparting information. We are loving people," Martin said.

He encouraged Catholics to invite someone to study the faith with them, whether that meant reading and discussing a weekly chapter of the Bible or a chapter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The challenge is to live the faith, not just to believe it, he said.

"We have raised a culture of people who don't know how to be happy because the virtues are the skills that they need to be happy," he said.

"They fill up on things that promise happiness and don't deliver."