Leading toward increased presence among young people

During two decades as vocation director, Sister Donna Del Santo, S.S.J. has led her community to new places by always listening to young people and the needs they express. With a team of members she has formed over the years, the sisters continuously ask how they might respond. The result has been to open their doors ever wider, finding creative, meaningful ways to connect with young people who very much want to learn from the sisters about prayer, service, and life direction. This article is based on Del Santo’s presentation for the NRVC webinar, “Using all avenues to support vocation ministry.” Find the hour-long webinar, which includes two presentations and a live Q&A, at nrvc.net/webinars.

The following words of Father Pedro Arrupe, S.J. are core to who I am as a woman religious and core to who I am as a vocation director because this life is a wonderful love story, one in which we love and serve God, and love and serve our neighbor.

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
that is, falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read,
who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

 I believe what people are seeking from us is guidance on how to live a loving and meaningful life rooted in God. However, today’s youth and young adults have little opportunity to get to know us because we have fewer members than in the past, and we no longer are in the places we once served, such as schools. Thus, a big part of our work is what I call loitering with intent. We need to ask ourselves: How are we present in places where youth and young adults gather?

Team approach, in person and online

I have a team of 10 other Sisters of Saint Joseph called the Vocation Think Tank. This is a group of sisters who, one-by-one, I have taken with me to the NRVC convocation where they all got turned on to vocation ministry, and now we minister together. They are counselors, members of our leadership team, a surgeon, teachers, and spiritual directors. They, too, are in love with our life and want to share it with others.

They and other sisters spend time with young adults in a variety of settings. For example, I volunteer in campus ministry at our former college, assisting with music at Mass and going on service trips with the students. In addition, my local community invites students to our home for what we call a Mass and a Meal, working closely with the campus minister (who, by the way, is a wonderful cook. I always sign up to cook when he does!). We can have up to 20 students in our chapel for Mass, which we follow with dinner together. After suspending Mass and a Meal during COVID-19, we just resumed them in February and had a great response.

The pandemic has shown us that being present doesn’t always mean being physically in the same place. We’ve been doing Busy Person Retreats for many years on college campuses throughout our region. Under COVID-19, we discovered that doing things online expanded our reach to places too far for us to drive to. As a result, we’ve expanded our outreach to colleges further away because we can visit with our students one-on-one online. This positive experience prompted us to offer an online retreat series exclusively for young women. In spring 2021, we created an online series on the Year of Joseph. Later, in light of our Ignatian spirituality, we presented an online, four-part series called “Finding God in all things.”

We’ve had up to 28 participants in our online retreats, and only three were from our Rochester, New York area. The rest came from across the U.S. and Canada. We would never have met them if we had limited ourselves to retreats done live and in person.

Living with young people

I live in a community that has welcomed over 1,000 youth and young adults into our home over the last 25 years through the SSJ Volunteer Corps. In addition, we welcome young adults who wish to live in an intentional community, and we are now welcoming college students who are housing and food insecure to live with us. These young people come for different reasons, yet, what they hold in common is they all agree to live life with us, sharing prayer, food, chores, conversation, and more. They get to see us up close and personal—and to be quite honest, having them in community with us helps us to be the best Sisters of Saint Joseph possible because we strive to be our better selves. This endeavor is not about age, as we range from age 67 to 92, and our oldest sister is the one young people often are most attached to. First and foremost, this ministry is one of presence, encounter, and invitation into the spaces where we live and carry out our daily lives.

If we look at the summary statements from the Bishop’s Synod on Young People, Faith and Vocational Discernment, we will find a road map on how to reach out, support, and invite youth and young adults to our lives.
The synod made clear that we need to:

• Be a listening church.

• Recognize the gift of youth to the church and the world.

• Recognize the mystery of each person’s vocation.

• Mentor youth in the art of discernment.

• Walk together in daily life.

We will see some of these elements in the key findings of NRVC’s 2020 Study on Recent Vocations. For example, there is an endless call to women and men to say yes to religious life. Yet even before that yes, there is a call to live a meaningful, authentic life, and unless we have encounters with youth, and let them get to know us in a real way, they will never develop a call to religious life.
The respondents to the 2020 NRVC study stated they were drawn to religious life by prayer, spirituality, charism, community life, and mission. By offering young adults hospitality in our homes and ministries, they have an opportunity to experience us up close and personally.

Study respondents also stated they are looking for cultural diversity and embrace intercultural and intergenerational living. So don’t be afraid of your age; it’s the vitality of our lives they are attracted to. Additionally, we need to ask: Who is not at our table who may not look like us? How are they experiencing our welcome?

Those who consider religious life are looking for a lifestyle that is committed to simple living in solidarity with those who are poor, and, I might add, solidarity with creation. What is our community life like, and how are we living a life that speaks to this desire?

Newer members have abundant hope for religious life. How are we living our lives? Are we full of hope for this life as well?

These ideas lead us back to the question: how do we meet the desires of those who seek us because of how we embrace and live our consecrated lives?

Again, I repeat the ways we Sisters of St. Joseph have tried to connect with young people who are seeking to know their call in life:

• Loiter with intent.

• Invite our community members to NRVC workshops and events.

• Spend time with young adults.

• Welcome young people into our home for a community experience, and welcome them to join us in ministry.

• Use online tools to connect.

• Remember that this is a ministry of presence, encounter, and invitation.

Let’s return to the guidance found in the words of Father Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
that is, falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.
Fall in love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

Sister Donna Del Santo, S.S.J. has been a member of Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester since 1992 and has served as her congregation’s director of vocations since 2003. Much of her work has focused on creating a culture of vocation in which it is easy to ask, “What does God want, and what do the church and the world need from me?”