By Anthony Barich
THE Catholic Prayer Festival is being re-booted in Perth from 11-13 February to showcase a “smorgasbord” of Catholic culture and provide faith formation for youth.
City Beach parish priest Fr Don Kettle, who facilitated the hugely successful festival as director of the Archdiocesan Catholic Youth Ministry office for three years, told The Record that, as Pope Benedict XVI said, one of the biggest crises facing youth today is that they are not catechised.
“After we hosted these festivals, young people were saying ‘why haven’t we heard this?’ Youth want clear direction in their lives, and there is a need for them to be spiritually nourished and encouraged,” Fr Kettle said.
The festival, which costs $70 per person and will be held at the Adventist Camp in Maida Vale, also aims to honour priests who preach with authority the Truth as Jesus received from the Father and passed down to the Apostles and the priests of today.
It will include catechesis by priests, discussion groups, fellowship and meeting other Catholics, perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, Cenacle with priests on the Friday night, a Eucharistic procession, books and CD resources on display plus daily recitation of the Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet and the Angelus.
The CYM-hosted Prayer Festivals geared up for World Youth Day Cologne 2005. This year’s Festival, the first since 2006 and themed Christ enters our life in the Eucharist to transform it at its very core, is placed four months prior to the 16-21 August World Youth Day Madrid.
“The Prayer Festival is a call to all young Catholics to prayer with like-minded, committed youth who are on fire about their Catholic Tradition,” Fr Kettle said.
“It is an opportunity for young people to open the treasury of the Church to explore the different ways in which to pray, in solitude and to come together in communion to worship and praise God and receive catechesis on what the Church teaches about their faith and how we, through our prayer, give to God what is due to Him through love for His Church.”
The Festival sprang out of a weekly discernment group of about 30 youth led by diocesan priest Fr Tim Deeter in Rossmoyne, Greenmount and Mt Lawley from 1997.
These youth, who called themselves the Confraternity of St Michael the Archangel, organised a retreat at Rottnest Island in 1997 then two more at New Norcia in ‘98 and ’99 that were expanded to married and Religious and included prayers with the Benedictine monks.
Some members then joined others to start at New Norcia the Jubilee 2000 Retreat for young Catholics, named after the Jubilee Year Pope John Paul II initiated to open new horizons in preaching the Kingdom of God and be a time of repentance, both for individuals and for the Church as a whole.
The idea of a prayer festival was inspired by a similar retreat organisation called Youth 2000 UK which was flourishing.
Seventy people gathered for spiritual and educational formation and to honour priests, some of whom gave talks on sexuality in the context of vocations, the Eucharist and perpetual adoration.
The Catholic Prayer Festival, which the Jubilee Festival evolved into in 2001, always had a quote or title of a Church or papal document as its theme, and priests would then “unpack it” for the participants.
It included a night of Reconciliation and a Eucharistic procession.
It also included a “panel” where priests answered questions on the catechesis while also revealing humorous stories from their own lives that enabled the youth to relate to them more.
Fr Deeter will return for the 11-13 February event, presenting a keynote talk on Liturgy and the Eucharist, along with Fr Kettle’s talk on Liturgy of the Word and Franciscan Friar of the Immaculate Fr Michael Joseph Mary McShane talking on Mary and the Eucharist.
Further information: contact catholicprayerfest@gmail.com
phone 0431 228 630 or go to “Catholic Prayer Festival” on Facebook.