The Catholic Braves invited seminarians with the New Evangelization Team from Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland to share their message on campus Feb. 3 to 5.
The main event of the week involved standing on the quad and talking with students who were willing to stop and have a conversation with the seminarians and Catholic Braves.
“If you are walking down the quad and you see 30 to 40 seminarians as well as students, you’re going to ask questions and you’re going to think, ‘What is that?’,” Joe Muting, president of the St. Joseph Newman Center, said.
The seminarians are required to take an evangelization trip to a campus at some time during their six years at the seminary, according to seminarian Adam Cesarek.
“Evangelization is the idea of going out and helping people to see the faith— never imposing but always proposing,” Cesarek said.
Cesarek said the trip is essential because some of the seminarians do not have much experience preaching to students.
“They find [talking to students] a little intimidating at first, but after [they] start diving in and start talking to people, I think what they find is that people are much more inclined to talk about their faith than they actually think,” Cesarek said.
Cesarek said it is important to evangelize on college campuses because academic reason compliments the Catholic faith.
“Often people think that faith is completely blind, but actually there is a great deal of reason,” Cesarek said. “Faith and reason can’t exist without one other. If God is true and science is true, then those things have to come together.”
Muting said the seminarians were able to have conversations with many students and created a buzz on social media.
Senior political science major Jacob Knobbe said he was eating in the Michel Student Center when three seminarians approached him and his friend.
“After some small talk, they asked us what our faith life was like growing up and now at Bradley,” Knobbe said. “They became really curious once me and my friend said we don’t have an active faith life.”
Knobbe said the conversation lasted about 30 minutes.
“[The conversation] was a little uncomfortable, but only because it’s hard to talk to anyone about religion, especially someone you’ve just met,” Knobbe said. “[The seminarians] seemed genuinely curious about our viewpoints on faith and religion.”
The seminarians and students also held a procession with songs and prayer through campus. A total of about 50 students participated.
“We [took] what looks like a piece of bread, but is really the true body of Christ and [walked] around to allow the Lord to be present in a very powerful way on the campus,” Cesarek said. “[It allowed] people to experience [Christ] in a way they’ve maybe never experienced him before.”
According to junior Amanda Nobis, chairperson of the New Evangelization Team movement, Catholic Braves was on a waiting list for the evangelization team for four or five years. They were pleased the seminarians could come now, with the loss of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) group last year.
FOCUS included a group of missionaries who lived on campus year-round.
“Their full-time job was to be a resource to students and be out on the quad trying to have conversations,” Nobis said.
According to Muting, FOCUS was lost due to budget cuts by the Catholic Diocese of Peoria.
“Sometimes when you look at what FOCUS did, [student missionaries] were supposed to be doing that anyway,” Muting said. “[Student missionaries] have kind of lagged on that because FOCUS held us more accountable, and the missionaries helped out.”
Nobis said she hopes the seminarians with the New Evangelization Team will inspire her and her peers to refocus on their student missionary responsibilities.
“A lot of times, I have so much schoolwork that [my job as a student missionary] gets pushed by the wayside with no one there to make sure I’m doing it,” Nobis said. “Hopefully with this event, [us student missionaries] can get it in our heads that we really need to be on top of things.”
Bradley will also lose both campus ministers at the end of the year, although at least one new minister will be hired, according to Nobis.
However, Nobis said she thinks the leaders of Catholic Braves are well equipped to take on the challenges ahead, and they will be able to grow together with the new campus minister.
