These students form the Catholic Leadership Group, a joint collaboration between two sibling secondary schools, Notre Dame and Neil McNeil, whose primary purpose is to bring young people closer to God. They meet every Friday in the classrooms of Notre Dame.
The CLG is based upon this circular form of evangelization: the students taking part in the retreats learn about being confirmed in their faith from a group of high school students (the majority of who have already been through the sacrament), and these high school students learn from those taking part in the retreats that they organized. It is a unique symbiotic process where one group learns from the other in an endless exchange of personal experience, discussion and prayer. Their motto: “Lead like Christ.”
CLG was founded five years ago after students and teachers from the two schools recognized a growing distance between young people and the Church. Although it is overseen by a group of teachers from the schools, CLG has been run by students.
The group accomplishes its mandate of reaching out to youth through the organization of retreats for Grade 8 students that focus on guiding them in the transition to high school and in the journey to Confirmation, a sacrament that most elementary students of the Toronto Catholic District School Board take part in before they graduate.
“Many people in today’s generation turn from even the idea of faith because they don’t see how God could possibly matter to them — and we wanted to change that through this group,” said Jo Cruz, 19, a Notre Dame graduate and one of the CLG founders.
The goal of bridging the distance between young people and the Church is the fundamental aspect of the group.
That is why in planning retreats, the CLG incorporates music, skits, testimonials, interactive lessons and small group discussions in order to engage students as much as possible. Along with the desire to retain the integrity of a prayerful atmosphere that should accompany any sort of faith-based retreat, the group’s interactive and personal approach to connecting with students has been instrumental in the CLG’s success.
“We definitely want those in the retreat to feel at home,” said Jeanmarc Francois, 18, a CLG graduate from Neil McNeil. “After all, the topics of God and moving into a new high school aren’t easy things to talk about.”
These retreats are led entirely by the student leaders that make up the CLG. Although the group of four teacher moderators offer guidance, set meeting dates, supervise the students on retreat days and manage general administration, the students take most of the work in their hands by putting together all the components of the retreats.
Over the course of one year, the group organizes around 10 retreats that take up an entire school day, which all take place within the gyms and auditoriums of the local elementary schools that surround the two schools. Entire Grade 8 classes take part in these retreats and some schools have even brought in Grade 7 students to be a part of the experience.
As much as the CLG’s success has been reliant on the student-to-student connection on which the group capitalizes, much of it also lies in something much simpler: the group gives students a chance to speak about their faith.
As Phillip Cummings, one of the CLG’s co-ordinators and Neil McNeil’s chaplain says, “The entire purpose of the group is to simply establish a safe place where students can discuss the things that are so often ignored and grow in them, and this is for the students who organize the retreats just as much as it is for the kids who take part in them.”
(Olivo, 17, is a Grade 12 student at Neil McNeil High School in Toronto.)