St. Irene Parish
Youth Board Information

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Members of the Youth Board:

• Patricia Barry
• Charles Ferraro
• Michelle Mostello
• Jean Butler
• Jim Marchant
• Georgia Winfrey

June 21, 2000

Dear St. Irene Parishioner,

This letter comes to you from the newly created Parish Youth Board. Father Donohoe has gathered us to represent all of you and to assist him in establishing programs that do a better job meeting the needs of our youth in grades 7 - 12.

Several of our members spoke at Mass last weekend and we would like to further explain our mission.

We are sure we speak for all of you when we say that we as a parish family love our young people, and want that is best for them. The Parish Youth Board's job is to give concrete expression to this love we share. We are writing to you now to let you know the direction of our plans and to invite your input.

Our mission is simple, but at the same time very challenging - because the needs of our youth in our time are very challenging. Let me list a few of the needs we intend to meet:

1. Our teens need to come of age with a faith which is bigger than the alluring, but faithless values, of contemporary society.
2. Our teens need to become enthused about and committed to their faith and to discover the great strength waiting for them at this table each week.
3. Our teens need to feel a new degree of love and attention being focused by their parents and their parish on their emerging faith.
4. Our teens need their parents to play a much more active role in helping them mean every word they say when they make their adult commitment at Confirmation.

This new Youth Board of ours believes that most of you share these same concerns. We think we speak for virtually all of you with this thought: Look at this beautiful Church which we have built. Now it is time to build something just as beautiful for our young people.

I am referring to those in middle school, Confirmation Candidates, and other teens. The needs of all three age groups have outgrown the programs we now provide for them. They need programs that attract them, grip them, challenge them, and bring them to a strong and active Catholic faith.

We have decided to begin our work of renovation with the Confirmation program because the Archdiocese has called for some very specific changes in the way our youth are brought to that sacrament.

You may inquire about the needs of the other two age groups; please be assured, our mission is to rebuild everything we do for youth, but we have to proceed one step at a time. When I refer to " Our Mission " I mean all of us as a parish family because the changes that are needed will require support of one sort or another from everyone here. This is a mission for the parish as a whole. Let me show you how this works with the new approach to confirmation.

It used to be that Confirmation was somewhat automatic: Just show us to class for two years, and we will recommend you to the bishop a being ready for the Sacrament. The Archdiocese now has criteria for readiness. Each of you has to meet these criteria. You have to be truly ready to make this commitment in order for us to recommend you.

The parish used to say to parents: Just drop off your young people and we will prepare them. The Archdiocese now says to parents, and so do we: Preparation for this sacrament is a joint effort between home and parish. Our youth need us to work together.

Confirmation used to be a parent's decision, and as a result many teens stood up before their family, their parish, their bishop and their God on that important day and made the commitment to adult faith with their arm twisted behind their back repeating words that meant nothing to them. In effect they made their Confirmation vows with their fingers crossed behind their back.

The Archdiocese now says, and so do we: One of the big criteria for readiness is that only those young people get confirmed who desire this sacrament for themselves because of what the Church means to them personally. That's a big challenge to parents and to the adults in their lives. We have to show them a faith they can relate to and commit to - a faith which we are excited about, a faith we are willing to live out on a daily basis and defend when it is attacked.

It used to be that a lot of parents showed up at Confirmation who themselves were not practicing their faith. The Archdiocese now says, and so do we: You can't give your teens what you don't have yourself. If your faith has faded and needs to be renewed, that's the single most powerful way you can build the faith of your sons and daughters.

This year we are planning to install a family based program, which will assist not just young people but also parents to take substantial steps of spiritual growth and renewal.

Here is how the new Confirmation program will accomplish this. We have hired a consultant who has developed a program and a curriculum around these new standards of the Archdiocese. Bob Doolittle has been running our confirmation retreats for about six years and we have already used some of his curriculum material and found it very much to the liking of both our teens and our adult leaders.

With his help, and the full support of Father Donohoe, we have formed this Board to train the parents of all our candidates on their role in the program. Me. Doolittle will train the adult leaders who will be implementing the program.

There is one more group of adults whose attention and support will be very much needed by our ninth and tenth grade candidates. Those adults are YOU! Our candidates need to feel the love of their parish family. Your help is needed in several ways:

1. Would you be willing to welcome them as they (many of them) start attending Mass again?
2. Would you be willing to pray for them and congratulate them as they celebrate at the weekend Masses the Rite of Enrollment and the Rite of Election, which are preliminary commitments on their way to the full commitment of the Rite of Confirmation?
3. Would you be willing to step forward to be a sponsor/mentor, a second kind of sponsor for some candidates who need a local sponsor because their family sponsors are too distant to help them?
4. Would you be willing to take the name of a candidate and be a special prayer partner for that young person in the second year of the program?

But, beyond these very concrete expressions of your love for the teens that Christ has given to this parish family, they need one gift from you underlying the rest. They need - and we as a Board need - you to understand and believe in the vision of Confirmation to which we call them, a vision which they will need everyone's help to grasp and make their own.

They and their parents will need to feel the support of this worshiping community because at first the kind of faith we will seek for them may seem beyond their reach. But this program has been road tested and found to work.

They can develop a Catholic faith that is bigger and stronger than the faithless values of contemporary America that tug at them everyday. But they will need us to believe they can do it. They can discover the amazing strength available to them at weekly Mass. But they need us to believe they can do it. They can realize the great difference, which that strength can mean in their daily lives. But they will need us to believe they can do it.

So we, as a Board of Directors, see ourselves representing the entire parish as well as Father Donohoe in our advocacy and planning for the youth of Saint Irene's. We have enclosed a page of questions and answers about the program. We have also enclosed a response sheet to allow you to ask questions and share ideas so that our planning really does give concrete expression to the love we all share for our Saint Irene young people.

Yours in Christ,

Pat Barry
Jean Butler
Charles Ferraro
Jim Marchant
Michelle Mostello
Georgia Winfrey
Fr. Tom Donohoe