By Nicholas Elbers, The B.C. Catholic

[Calgary – Canadian Catholic News] – For Julian Piezas, the annual Rise Up conference, organized by Catholic Christian Outreach (CCO), is the best way he has found to beat the holiday doldrums.

“During Christmas time there is a tension for a lot of students and young adults where we know the reason for the season and the value of spending time with family and stuff, but you still feel sort of alone,” he told The B.C. Catholic.

Attending Rise Up for the second year in a row, Piezas was one of over 50 B.C. young adults in a group that included Father Raffaele Salvino from the Archdiocese of Vancouver’s vocations team. This year, the annual conference took place in Calgary from Dec. 29 to Jan. 1.

Piezas said spending time in adoration with the other 500 students and CCO missionaries was his highlight and the perfect antidote to the creeping Christmas detachment he and many other young people sometimes feel during the holidays.

Piezas was also excited to talk about one of the prominent speakers for this year’s conference, Msgr. James Shea, president of the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Shea’s talk focused on a core question that all people of faith ultimately need to reckon with: “Why does God care about us?”

Piezas said focusing on this question—especially on how the Incarnation shows God’s love for us—during the Christmas Octave was meaningful to him.

 

Shea explained that his interest in the question was sparked when a Wall Street friend posed it to him. Reflecting on the question, he noted, “Anybody who’s spent any time in this broken world … knows that there’s something wrong. Look what the human race has done to this world: transforming it from a garden of peace and sweet encounters into a laboratory of colossal ingratitude, rebellion, violence, murder, and selfishness.”

Shea’s friend compared humans drifting away from God’s grace to a state of “zombiedom,” alluding to mass media’s fascination with zombies as revealing something unsettling about the human condition.

 

“There is a sense that maybe we’re just a hair’s breadth away from atrocity, and we see it in our history,” Msgr. Shea said. “What would it take for us to be bitten and to change from good, decent men and women into the worst of the worst? Maybe not very much for the mass of humanity of people we pass by on the street, on campus, and in the office to transfix into a mob capable of doing the worst things.”

Shea suggested that fortitude and comfort can be drawn from St. Paul’s New Testament writings, which affirm that God engraved His image on each of us and that evil forces cannot fully eradicate this divine imprint.

The theme of the 2024 Rise Up Conference, the 23rd iteration of this Canadian Catholic young adult summit, was “take courage.”

Shea emphasized that courage in faith begins with understanding that God is committed to His plan to draw humanity into deeper communion with Him—a plan made possible through the Incarnation.

“By taking this action, God raised human beings, a race of zombies, to an unbelievably high place—above the angels,” said Msgr. Shea. “He [granted humans] a dignity and an honour unimaginable by an act of astonishing condescension. To use a phrase of the ancient teachers of the faith, ‘God became man so that man might become god.’ It was a motion of divinization, a gift of extraordinary merit.”

 

Shea urged attendees to “renounce your rebellion” against God’s will and “turn back to Him to receive His life once again,” comparing this momentous decision to the parable of the lost sheep being found.

Other speakers included Canadian Martyrs’ Shrine director Father John O’Brien , CCO co-founder Angele Regnier, and a group of active and former CCO missionaries. Each shared personal accounts and demonstrated a willingness “to really be vulnerable” in their talks, said event manager Joseph Murphy.

The conference also featured men’s and women’s sessions, holiness and mission workshops, Mass, and a New Year’s Eve banquet and dance, dubbed “Rizz Up” on CCO’s social media channels.

Launch of Canadian Martyrs relic tour

A unique feature this year was the presence of major relics of the Canadian Martyrs. On Dec. 31, the skull of St. Jean de Brébeuf and the bones of St. Gabriel Lalemant and St. Charles Garnier — and a relic of St. Kateri Tekakwitha — were venerated.

 

Local attendee Ava Gravela told The B.C. Catholic that the relics were a highlight for her. “Standing before St. Jean de Brebeuf’s relic, his skull was a powerful reminder of his love for God, his hope, and his unwavering courage. The Lord may not ask me to sacrifice my life for the gospel, but in that moment, He asked me to trust Him in the unknown, just as St. Jean de Brébeuf did.”

Gravela added that during his talk, Father John O’Brien reminded them that “as spiritual descendants of the Canadian Martyrs, we have inherited their courageous hearts. Now, it is up to us to continue trusting the Lord through every storm.”

The relic tour will be passing through Vancouver, before continuing across Western Canada, including a stop from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 24 at the Cathedral of the Holy Family in Saskatoon. Read more about the relic tour here.

With files from The Catholic Register.

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Canadian Catholic News (CCN) is a national news service, with members including Catholic newspapers, organizations, and individuals: CanadianCatholicNews.ca

Catholic Saskatoon News is supported by gifts to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal: dscf.ca.