Quote
“We need to reach the entire world and the way to do it is to reach American university students.” |
Curtis Martin, founder of Fellowship of Catholic University Students, which gathered more than 6,000 young adults for its Seek 2013 Convention last month at Walt Disney World in Florida. The organization reaches out to college students to help them develop a relationship with God and then evangelize in the U.S. and abroad. (Catholic News Service)
Profile
Jessica Isabel Russell
Youth and young adult ministry leader, St. John the Baptist
- Favorite food: Chicken enchiladas with tomatillo sauce — my mom’s special.
- Movie: “Facing the Giants”
- Holiday: Christmas
- Commandment: Love God above all things.
- Parable: It’s not so much a parable but a Bible story — when Jesus heals the woman who had been bleeding for many years. He healed her when no one else could.
- Prayer: A lovely poem that I read to myself to remind me that God will never leave me no matter what comes into my life. It’s called “Footprints in the Sand.”
- Church song: “Los Peces en el Rio.”
- Most memorable priest: Father Jim McFadden, a Maryknoll missioner who passed away in New York on Dec. 2, 2002. He was the one who inspired me to become a youth group minister.
Saints under 35
‘Verso l’alto’
This simple Italian phrase, meaning “toward the top,” embodied Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati’s life. The Italian social and political activist — and avid mountaineer, who scrawled these words on a rock during a climb shortly before his death — spent much of his life working on behalf of the least fortunate and promoting the teachings of the Catholic Church, never slowing down in his efforts to spread the word of God.
Frassati was born in 1901 in Turin, Italy, and from an early age led a deeply spiritual life. He became a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and later joined the Lay Dominicans, through which he gladly served the poor and the suffering while also studying in the university. And he was not afraid to defend his faith — on occasion using force — against Communists and Fascists.
Frassati fell ill with poliomyelitis and died in 1925. The “Man of the Eight Beatitudes,” as Pope John Paul II called Frassati, was beatified in 1990.
Source: www.frassatiusa.org
