‘The Everyday Saint’ Catholic podcaster to visit Utah, speak to local youth on chastity

Friday, Dec. 27, 2024

Linda Petersen

Intermountain Catholic

SALT LAKE CITY — In January, Eve Rosemary, a Catholic speaker and founder of The Everyday Saint podcast, will visit Utah as part of her nationwide speaking tour and pilgrimage to Catholic shrines and cathedrals. While at the sites, Rosemary will record a podcast episode, a YouTube video and blog post focused on the history of each place. 

The second stop of the tour will be the Cathedral of the Madeleine. While in Utah, she also will share her thoughts on chastity with local youth through her presentation “Pursuing Something Greater.”

“I think it’s a message that our youth really need, especially in today’s society,” said Michael Edwards, director of the diocesan Youth and Young Adult Ministry. “They’re so bombarded by so many negative images of relationships in the news and in the media on their social feeds. It’s just something that, hopefully, they can latch on to and understand that there are good, healthy relationships out there.”

Rosemary will speak on Jan. 13 to students in a special assembly at St. Joseph Catholic High School in Ogden.

“I thought it was important for the students to understand healthy relationships as it pertains to the physical and emotional aspects,” Principal Clay Jones said. “Eve offers a wonderful example of this, and it shows in her relationship with God.”

Rosemary will give another presentation on Jan. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mary Catholic Church in West Haven and a third on Jan. 15 at 6:30 p.m. at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Draper.

The Everyday Saint podcast was launched two years ago, when Rosemary was a freshman at Benedictine College. 

“It’s really a wonderful Catholic college, and that really hadn’t been my experience in high school,” said Rosemary, who is originally from Green Bay, Wisc. “I remember feeling very isolated in my faith when I was in high school, just not seeing anyone my age taking their faith seriously. So now I was in a community of a lot of young Catholics truly living out their faith.”

Inspired by what she saw around her, Rosemary began interviewing other young Catholics about their faith on her podcast.

“They’re able to talk about their faith journey, how God works in their lives, as an example for other young people to see that there are young people taking their faith seriously, and they’re not alone in that journey,” she said.

Rosemary graduates this month from Benedictine College with a degree in theology and a minor in entrepreneurship. She has committed the next five months to the speaking tour/pilgrimage. 

After prayerfully considering the focus of her tour, she chose chastity as a topic because when she was in high school she had many conversations about chastity with friends and other people, “and they didn’t even know that it was a virtue that they could attain;” instead, it was considered “old school,” she said. “But to me, when I think about chastity, it’s one of the most beneficial ways that someone can live their life right now. Our family life in general is really suffering. We have a high divorce rate. We have a lot of children who don’t know that marriage is meant to be this really selfless gift of self to another person.”

Although some teens can feel uncomfortable when the subject of chastity is brought up, “I think that even proves more so that we do need to talk about it,” Rosemary said. “I want to be able to go in there and show them that this intimacy is not a bad thing, but it’s something that is so good that God gave us rules and regulations to make sure that it can be true and good.”

“What it goes back to is learning how to honor the body that God gave us and understanding how deep God’s love for us is,” she said. “If we’re able to see that in the way that we love others, … we’re going to be able to see that in the way that we love God and the way that God loves us in return.”

At 21, Rosemary is close to the age of those she speaks to, so she thinks her message and the commitment she has made to wait until marriage to be intimate with a partner can resonate more easily with them because “there’s a level of trust when it’s someone their age also making this decision,” she said.

She starts her talk discussing “identity and God first, and what it means to have this self-respect and then we go into chastity,” she said, and this allows her to “ease into the topic in a way that makes it a little bit more comfortable and attainable for them to understand.”