St. Mike’s campus minister to focus on inclusivity

As fully vaccinated, real-life students abandon their Zoom classrooms and filter back onto the University of St. Michael’s College campus, a new campus minister will be ready to provide face-to-face encounters of the spiritual kind.

Sonal Castelino has been chosen as the new director of campus ministry for Canada’s largest Catholic university.

“The experience of encounter is important in my life, and I want to create a space that is inclusive rather than exclusive,” Castelino said in a news release.

Running campus ministry is no minor position at St. Mike’s, said university president David Sylvester.

“It’s not just about making sure the liturgy works, or the clubs that are on campus,” Sylvester told The Catholic Register. “It’s about the strategic direction of the university.”

Castelino will report directly to Sylvester and take a seat at the university’s senior management table, he said. Campus ministry will be co-ordinated with all of the academic programs at the university at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

“Campus ministry will work with the academics and programming and experiential learning. It will work with the community and outreach,” Sylvester said. “It’s identified in our strategic plan as a clearly important area, not just for our undergraduate Catholic kids, but all our students, our graduate students, our faculty and staff and our alumni too. It’s a big task.”

Castelino is a University of Toronto graduate who took her Master of Divinity from Regis College. She worked for the University of Toronto’s Newman Centre as associate director of formation and at Regis College as recruiter and student life co-ordinator. She has volunteered as co-chair of the board of Jesuit Volunteers and recently pronounced first vows with La Xaviére Missionaire du Christ Jésus.