Our year began with five days of faith, fellowship and fun at the SEEK Conference.
Sydney Catholic Youth and University Chaplaincy were fortunate to join more than 17,000 Catholics as they congregated in Salt Lake City, Utah, to pray in a beautiful celebration of universality in the Catholic faith.
The program featured communal daily Mass and keynote presentations, with perpetual Eucharistic adoration and opportunities for the sacrament of confession throughout the conference.
A key theme at each of the plenary gatherings and breakout sessions was God’s desire for relationship and intimacy with us.
This was beautifully expounded by Dr Edward Sri as he encouraged the thousands of participants to form habits of prayer and include reading of the Bible into their daily schedule.
Having the opportunity to meet with and interact with internationally well-known Catholic figures who have contributed so much to our own personal faith and formation was a real highlight of the conference.
They included Dr Scott Hahn, Dr Tim Gray, Sr Mary Grace SV, Fr Simon Esshaki, and to see live Fr Mike Schmitz, Dr Trent Horn, Fr Boniface Hicks and many other incredible speakers.
In particular, we were blessed to have the opportunity to speak with Dr Tim Gray, international speaker and President of the Augustine institute.
The Augustine Institute run the media platform “Formed” which offers on-demand Catholic formation. It was very special to talk with Dr Gray as we use his resources often in our ministries here in Australia.
A further highlight of the conference was seeing all the different stalls from across the country.
There were over 250 sponsors and exposition stalls at the conference spanning from Catholic creatives selling saint-themed socks to expo stalls of countless religious orders and everything in between, including a Catholic dating stall.
These stalls were a great opportunity to network with the many different religious communities and Catholic services, that are using their unique gifts and talents to evangelise in our world.
SEEK featured a wide range of opportunities for everyone—keynote addresses delivered to huge numbers of attendees plus a variety of more intimate talks tailored to specific topics of interest.
Diverse subjects included transhumanism, “The Great Dance: Living the masculine and feminine mystery” and “Spiritual and religious: why we need the church.”
The sheer size of the conference has reignited our desire to bring all people into the church.
Some say that in this post-modern era that the church is dead—our experience at the SEEK says the exact opposite. The church is alive! And it is filled with young people who are ready to go out and make disciples.
As our fellow Australian, Sr Mary Grace, said, “Jesus is not fixated on fixing you, He’s fixated on finding you.” It was in this experience that we also found Jesus in others as well.