By Emilie Ng
SCHOOL’S back for another term and there’s a flock of Catholic students ready to bring Jesus into the schoolyard.
Catholic student Amelia Harman, 15, left a Catholic youth event last weekend with a renewed heart to evangelise her school.
Miss Harman was one of 1300 young people from across Australia and New Zealand in Brisbane for Ignite Conference.
“It can be quite hard to share your faith at school,” Miss Harman said.
“You feel you can’t do too much but you have to do a little bit to try and get it in.
“That’s why it’s really good to come to these conferences because it really builds up your courage and strength to go out and evangelise in your school and make a change.
“But if you just trust in God, He can do anything.”
The four-day conference is in its 15th year also gathered top Catholic speakers, priests and religious women from Australia, including two members of US youth movement Life Teen, Dominican Sister of St Cecilia Australian-born Sr Anastasia Reeves and Archbishop Mark Coleridge.
Archbishop Coleridge dropped some Papal advice on patience during his homily at Ignite Conference’s opening Mass on September 25.
He reminded young people that patience and faith were both counter-cultural and important virtues for Catholics.
“One of the words Pope Francis uses time and time again is the word patience,” he said. “We all have to learn a kind of patience – a patience which doesn’t lose nerve or heart because we believe that God is still with us and that God in God’s time will do what God has promised.
“This is what faith is – patience is a kind of faith – believing that the one who as asked us to hold our nerve and not lose heart will in fact act and speak.
“But if you lose patience and close your ear or if you fail to believe then of course you’ll miss it all and you’ll say there was nothing or nobody there.
“The call to you from Christ is to be young men and women of faith – which is counter-cultural, so too is patience.
“Listen to the one who will speak in His time. “To believe that is to understand the patience to which Pope Francis and the Lord Jesus call us.”
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