St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center: Student participation doubles

Friday, Dec. 03, 2021

SALT LAKE CITY — While the coronavirus pandemic raged across the nation last year, things slowed at St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center in Salt Lake City. As at many parishes and religious institutions across the world, services were severely curtailed and many programs put on hold. 

Father Cody Jorgensen, OP, director of campus ministry at St. Catherine’s, expected a significant drop in participation from the students at the three college campuses the Newman Center serves: the University of Utah, Westminster College and Salt Lake Community College. To his surprise, participation actually doubled as the Newman Center began to find its way to reach out to young Catholics in nontraditional ways. 

In recent months, that trend has continued.

“We’re actually seeing new growth in the way young people respond to the invitation to faith, in ways that I hadn’t seen before in my experience in campus ministry,” Fr. Cody said. “That renewal was founded on combining things that are new and old in the Church.”

With students unable to gather in large groups or attend Mass regularly, the Newman Center began a series of small prayer groups. The students would meet wherever and whenever they were comfortable in groups of four to seven people to practice lectio divina, a traditional monastic practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer.

“They found a way to meet together and to pray and to meditate together in prayer on the Gospels; that was the spiritual heart,” Fr. Cody said. “We had in 2020 more students in those small groups than we had in 2019 when we had a normal school year.”

In a way, the pandemic had a silver lining for some students. With most normal extracurricular activities halted, they had time to pause and to ponder. When the social distancing requirements loosened to allow greater in-person attendance at Mass, there was an exponential increase in those who came, Fr. Cody said.

“The pandemic created a space of silence” in the life of the campus and the students, he said. “They started engaging with [us] and started wanting something a little bit deeper.”

What happened at Mass built on what was going on in the lectio divina groups, he said. In addition, the students found new ways to connect with the divine in worship. With no choirs at any of the Masses, those in attendance began to sing, using what Fr. Cody called an “almost spontaneous polyphonic Mass setting.” 

“It was stunningly beautiful, and I had no idea where it came from; it was something I didn’t think was possible,” he added. 

As campus life has returned to close to normal, those who participated in the groups during the pandemic shutdown have largely remained engaged, he said.

“They started finding something here,” Fr. Cody said. “They started finding something in the liturgy of the Mass, the singing, the preaching, the small groups that was answering some question in their heart.”