Steubenville conference requires pain for religious revelations

Cynthia Duncan / Staff Writer / The USD Vista

The 2006 documentary “Jesus Camp” opened with the line, “There’s some new brand of religion out there.” At an evangelical Christian retreat in North Dakota led by pastor Becky Fischer, children as young as six were shown crying hysterically, screaming, speaking in tongues and having other reactions to the revivalist speeches like shaking or jerking uncontrollably. Fischer’s calm reaction while watching was juxtaposed horridly to the children’s complete loss of control.

People often view the extreme Christian right as the only brand of religion that defends such practices, but recently Catholicism has experienced some radicalism slipping into the lives of its youth.?

Over the last 30 years, a Catholic college called Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio has developed 15 youth conferences across the country, including in San Diego, which bring together roughly 40,000 high school students every summer. This past summer San Diego State housed over 4,000 participants. Similar to Fischer’s camp, participants leave with stories of teenagers experiencing various involuntary physical responses like fainting, screaming, wailing, speaking in tongues, shaking and laughing manically during an event called Eucharistic adoration. Eucharistic adoration is typically a quiet experience spent in the presence of the Eucharist, which is held in the center of a gold cross-like container, the monstrance, for public prayer.? However, at Steubenville’s conferences, which are focused on mostly Christian rock bands and lectures, this event is generally seen by participants as the “climax” since many enter a communal catharsis in which the reactions can be extreme. First time attendees are usually taken aback by the intensity of the experience.

The priest walks through every aisle in the Cox Arena, so that all 4,000 teens can be close to the Eucharist, which takes over two and a half hours. USD freshman Leigh Sherwood attended the conference in 2004 and 2005. Sherwood explains, “It’s like nothing you ever experience. You fall into it.” She says many retreats she has attended were emotional, but this was different because they got right to it. Sherwood did cry during the adoration, but recalls “I don’t know why I was crying, I still don’t.” After over two and a half hours in the Cox Arena watching teens who “had no control over themselves,” including a girl lying on the ground shuttering with sobs while three adults prayed over her, the youth groups went outside to talk about the experience. Sherwood’s group was told that those reactions were “because of all the pain inside them.” She says quietly “I didn’t understand, I had no clue what I was getting into.” Sherwood recalls matter-of-factly, “They told us we’d feel better in the morning. I didn’t feel better. I had puffy eyes and was depressed.”

Though Sherwood says the intensity of the experience “made going back to everyday life hard,” she attended the next year for the same reason many do, her youth group was going again. She recounts stories about some kids around her who “freaked out” including a girl laughing for hours straight and a boy and girl screaming and crying uncontrollably who had to be taken outside by adults; “People had to carry them out. The reactions alarmed her like the first year, but she says in addition, “It made me mad, I don’t know why. That wasn’t what I was supposed to be feeling, but I was furious. I kept thinking, just stop.”

Sherwood notes that a main problem she had with Steubenville was the “philosophy there that to go through a great revelation you need to experience something horrible, something painful.” She added, “It’s not something I talk about.” Unfortunately, this is the way the conference gets away with minors having reactions that could be categorized as brainwashing or abuse. Scared teens think that they are alone in questioning Steubenville’s practices. Many of their friends fall head-over-heels into it, which makes it a sensitive thing to question. The minority who had violent reactions leave and speak loudly about how it changed their lives, while the majority suffers in fear and silence. This is a movement in the Catholic Church that is worth standing up against.
However, it is going to take awareness of people in San Diego and their parishes to keep these practices from being implemented elsewhere.