Youth Speak News

SUDBURY, Ont. - When Matthew Schouten found out his parish church was closing and merging with another, he immediately decided he would lend a helping hand. The 18-year-old was one of many young people who came together to create a brand new place of worship for their small town of Espanola, 45 minutes outside of Sudbury in the diocese of Sault Ste. Marie.

Why do we struggle with patience? Why is waiting so hard? It's because our pace of life has quickened. It's difficult to have patience in a society where cell phones, the Internet and bank machines eliminate much waiting in our lives.

HALIFAX - When the doorbell rings on a rainy Saturday evening in mid-October, three enthusiastic young women, along with the smell of a homemade salmon casserole, welcomed me through the doors of the Queenship House. It’s a community for young Catholic lay women, currently home to Cristina Tersigni, 26, Jen MacDonald, 32, Ania Szymanska, 20, and Katherine McGee, 19.

EDMONTON - It’s not every day that students earn marks for attending Mass at an aboriginal parish. But Angela Bokenfohr, a theology student at St. Joseph’s College on the University of Alberta campus, is doing just that.

All my life, people have asked me what do I want to be when I grow up? With my graduation from university looming at the end of this school year, it seems that people expect me to know that fairly soon.

BRAMPTON, Ont. - A movie about the realities of the homeless is not a subject most Hollywood directors dream about filming, but it was an obvious choice for 15-year-olds Audrey Naluz and Arianne Villa.

MOOSE JAW, Sask. - A group of citizens from Moose Jaw is hard at work building a unique project at Vanier Collegiate, Moose Jaw’s only Catholic  high school. An outdoor stopping station labyrinth, a pathway that one follows while reflecting and stopping for prayer, is halfway through its construction phase.

The balcony of the Catholic Church in Sainte-Anne, a small, semi-French-speaking town in Manitoba, is where I sat with a handful of Catholic teens on Sundays growing up. While our parents usually sat downstairs, we were removed from the congregation, not held to pay too much attention during Mass. Often, Sunday mornings spent on that balcony was the only church connection young people had.

Being a Catholic in Quebec is definitely not easy, but being a young Catholic in Quebec is even harder — or at least that’s how it seems. As a young practising Catholic, I can honestly say that I’ve struggled to maintain my faith.