By Jonah McKeown/Catholic News Agency
In January 1999, Pope John Paul II visited St. Louis and celebrated Mass in the massive stadium that was at the time the venue for the St. Louis Rams NFL team.
Twenty-five years later, on Friday, tens of thousands of mostly young people gathered in the same stadium for Mass once again, marking the closing of the largest Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) conference yet.
Bishop David L. Toups, shepherd of the Diocese of Beaumont, Texas, and principal celebrant for the final Mass, preached before the crowd of approximately 22,000 people.
“You encourage us to be the best servants of the Lord we can be,” the bishop said, addressing the young people.
“We have a mission to make Christ known and loved and served in this world. Why? To save souls … failure is not an option.”
Final attendance numbers for the SEEK 24 conference have not yet been released, but at a Wednesday evening session of adoration, an estimated 24,000 people knelt before Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist. Official figures from earlier in the week suggested that this year’s conference was bigger than last year’s by almost every metric, including a 28% increase in the number of paid attendees. Nearly double the number of bishops and seminarians attended this year compared with 2023 as well.
The conference, which is taking place next year in Salt Lake City, attracted young people, clergy, religious sisters, and more from around the world this week for Catholic-themed talks, workshops, entertainment, and worship. The conference was organized by FOCUS, whose missionaries work to reach young people on college campuses through personal relationships and friendships. The conference also featured a specific track for adult Catholics seeking to become leaders within their parishes.
Immediately before the Mass, keynote speakers Kelsey Skoch and Chris Stefanick offered words of encouragement to the attendees, highlighting the importance of boldly proclaiming the faith even after the conference ends.
“We need to recover the courage of John Paul II because our world desperately needs it,” said Stefanick, host of Real Life Catholic on EWTN.
In his talk, Stefanick emphasized to the students the importance of continuing the journey deeper into faith by inviting them to join an online Bible study beginning Jan. 17 and led by FOCUS co-founders Curtis Martin and Edward Sri.
Stefanick said although the large conference may be ending, the work of sharing the faith with the world continues, albeit on a smaller scale.
“The central event for FOCUS is a Bible study with five kids at it … we need to stop underestimating our power as ordinary, average, everyday Christians,” Stefanick said.
“The Church needs you. The world needs you.”
Skoch, a Catholic evangelist from Kansas City, similarly encouraged the young people to share their newly-renewed faith with the people they already know and those whom they encounter in the world.
“Do you know how many people are outside of this dome that I will never have an opportunity to reach? But you can,” she said.
Students attending the conference told EWTN that they have experienced a strengthening of their Catholic faith, and many are well aware that their faithfulness goes against the prevailing societal narratives about a largely irreligious Gen Z.
Evelyn Shirtliff, a freshman at Hillsdale College from Ann Arbor, Michigan, said she has also been gratified to see so much unity among the conference attendees amid so many reports of division in the world and in the Church.
“I’ve never been to a giant Catholic conference before. Just seeing that many people who all share your beliefs, and they come from lots of different backgrounds and just seeing everyone come together in that union, I think that’s something that’s really powerful about the Catholic Church — the unity and the beauty of that unity,” Shirtliff told CNA. “We’re all here for him and we’re giving everything to him.”
Katherine Cullen, a Benedictine College student also from Ann Arbor, said she has faith that being in Christ’s presence will produce positive effects on all the attendees, even if they don’t realize how they have been changed.
“Just by being in his presence, that is life-changing for everyone in the room,” she said.
“Everyone’s going to be changed in some way, even if they don’t know it.”
