The parish’s youth groups — one for high school students and the other for young adults aged 19 to 35 — are constantly undergoing preparations for upcoming missionary and pastoral trips that will help them mature as Catholics.
The two groups are under the guidance of associate pastor Fr. Marcin Serwin who has developed the rigourous plan, which began last year with a nine-day pilgrimage to Rome for the Year of Faith.
The trip, the first of many, was meant to help the youth experience the universality of the Church and witness its presence beyond the Polish-Canadian community.
“I feel that the upcoming trips will provide the youth with wonderful opportunities to help grow in holiness,” said Magdalena Poweska, a member of the older youth group. “By experiencing fellowship with others, we can hope to bond and build up our youth community in Christ.”
This year’s theme is faith and reason, a topic explored and discussed deeply at the groups’ weekly meetings. To live out the theme, the parish is hoping to send 14 young adults on a threeweek mission trip to Madagascar in August.
“Madagascar is the third poorest country in the world. Our youth will have the opportunity to learn from the people there about what is truly most important in life.
It will strengthen their vocations as givers of their God-given talents,” Serwin said.
A five-day pastoral retreat at the end of June will also take place in Whistler, B.C., with about 50 participants from both youth groups.
“It will be a retreat in the footsteps of Blessed John Paul II, who’s canonization we will celebrate this month, who often took youth for trips to the mountains to experience God amidst His creation,” Serwin said.
But the parish’s youth ministry does not intend to stop there. For 2015, the focus will be on brotherhood and taking the first steps on the journey to World Youth Day in 2016, to be held in Poland.
The groups will travel to Marseille, France, where they will rally with Oblate youth from around the globe. To explore the topic of brotherhood, they will reflect on the thousands of missionaries who left France to evangelize new lands centuries ago. It will be a trip in the steps of St. Eugene de Mazenod, the founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order which runs St. Casimir’s parish.
Then the groups will travel to Lourdes to live out what they learned in Marseille. They will assist sick pilgrims by taking them around the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, helping them carry out their daily functions.
“It will allow the youth to learn to sacrifice a bit of themselves out of love and help the sick to feel God’s closeness,” Serwin said.
Continuing with the theme of brotherhood, the missionary trip for 2015 will be to northern Cameroon, where there are Christian- Islamic societies. St. Casimir’s youth will learn to “cross borders” and see the brother within the other person, despite the differences, religious or otherwise, between them.
Then, in 2016, the parish is hoping to send its youth and young adults to WYD in Krakow, Poland. Most are of full or partial Polish descent, so this trip to their ancestral homeland will mark an especially important time.
They will also travel to Wadowice, the birthplace of Blessed John Paul II, and Auschwitz, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners were systematically killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.
According to the plan, in 2016 the groups will also travel to the southwestern mountains of Mexico, where Serwin says the youth will rebuild a school and learn how the people living there work hard to sustain their families, yet do not forget about God.
The final year of the plan, 2017, includes a missionary trip up north to Iqaluit, Nunavut. The parish will also send its youth groups to the Holy Land to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
“The youth will get an opportunity to see the differences that divide that land (Israel), yet learn that peace can come if the one God who chose that place in a special way for His own will remain at the centre,” said Serwin.
(Wojdylo, 18, is a Grade 12 student at Bishop Allen Academy in Toronto.)