Celebrating the Young Church of Today

I was privileged to grow up during a ‘Golden Era’ of C.Y.O. within the Archdiocese of Boston. The C.Y.O. (Catholic Youth Organization) kept us so busy during the days of our youth that we didn’t have time to get in trouble! Almost every parish had a CYO that coordinated social, spiritual, athletic, cultural and ser-vice opportunities for teenagers. Our social lives cen-tered on Friday night CYO Dances. The best and the biggest were at Holy Name Parish, West Roxbury with live bands such as ‘The Techniques’ from the Surf Ballroom at Nantasket Beach. Parishes sponsored countless basketball, baseball, softball and hockey teams, as well as cheerleaders. Parishes also sponsored hundreds of bands, drum and bugle corps color guards and drill teams. They would all come together at White Stadium in Boston after a full summer schedule of competitions for the ‘CYO Music Festival”. The climax of the awards ceremony at the Music Festival was the moment when the young men and women who were putting aside their band uniforms for the cassocks of seminarians or the habits of novices entering religious life to step forward. The number of those stepping for-ward would approach two hundred some years.

The center point of the CYO Year was the celebration of the Feast of Christ the King which was typically observed in parishes as CYO Sunday with the installa-tion of the CYO leaders and a Communion Breakfast following Mass. Some years ago, we restored this Sunday’s Feast of Christ the King at Saint Mary Parish and Saint Martha Parish as CYO Sunday with a special blessing on the opening of CYO Basketball Season. Our collaborative will sponsor 10 CYO basketball teams for 130 boys and girls this year. We are grateful to Robert Hickey and the dozens of adult volunteers who generously donate their time and talent as coaches, youth ministers and catechists for our young people. As we have done for the past four years, we will celebrate an Opening Mass for CYO Basketball on the Feast of Christ the King as a birthday memorial for Coach Tim Gemelli who was an integral part of youth baseball in the Town of Wrentham.

CYO was never just about basketball. It sought to pro-vide a wide variety of opportunities for young people to discover their talents and abilities while growing in faith within the community of the Church.We have been witnessing a hopeful revival of youth ministry at Saint Martha and Saint Mary Parishes. Teams of twenty to thirty high school students have committed themselves to Mission Service Trips to Mis-sissippi, Puerto Rico and Texas and Vermont over the past four summers. Our middle school students are en-gaged in a wide range of social and service activities. Our high school students headed off to Maine for a white water rafting in September and participated in a weekend retreat two weeks ago that was personally transformational for many of them. Our Director of Faith Formation for Youth, Bob Collins, has remarked to me many times that ‘We are witnessing the resur-gence of a new golden era of youth ministry right here in our two parishes!’ Regretfully, Bob Collins needed to step down recently from his youth ministry and cate-chetical leadership positions within our collaborative due to family responsibilities. Bob has certainly been a foundation stone of the renewed youth ministry initia-tives within our collaborative. He hands on a vital par-ish youth ministry in an exponentially stronger position than when he took it on eight years ago as a veteran Youth Minister who just happened to move to Wren-tham! We are grateful that Trish Moore continues to enthusiastically embrace her commitment as Coordina-tor of High School Youth Ministry for our parishes and meets with a growing number of our high school stu-dents and adult youth ministers on Tuesday evenings in the rectory for faith sharing, fun, food, prayer and plan-ning for new activities. These are definitely signs of hope for greater involvement of the young people of our parishes in our communities of faith. Praise be to Christ the King!