It's Cool to be Catholic

Jamey Guerrero here from St Bernadette Parish in Surrey.

With World Youth Day 2011 quickly approaching, I decided to reminisce about WYD Sydney 2008. WYD Sydney was my first ever pilgrimage. Leading up to our group's departure, I didn't know what to expect. As one of the two practicing Catholics among my close, personal friends, I normally felt out of place. Sharing my faith with them usually went over all their heads and it eventually came to a point where I just stopped sharing. While I did have friends from my Youth Ministry, I really wanted to be able to share my thoughts and beliefs with my friends I've grown up with through elementary and high school. But because of the lack of communication with my best friends, I eventually went into a phase where faith took the back seat in my life.

Up until WYD in 2008, much of my faith-based activities were centred around my parish's Youth Ministry. I helped out with coordinating the youth events at St B's, went to Mass every week and sang in the choir, but that was really it for me. After youth events or after Mass, I just returned to my day-to-day routine then repeated the following weekend, then, spent some time with my friends while forgetting everything I've learned in the last week.

To be completely honest, I was looking forward to the traveling and touring aspect of WYD 2008 and not the pilgrimage itself. I was more worried about the food I was going to eat than how this pilgrimage would change me as a Catholic. However, this quickly changed as soon as WYD started in Sydney.

At the Opening Mass, I was overwhelmed at the amount of young people in attendance. I've never seen so many Catholics, young Catholics, singing and praising God in my entire life. It was such an incredible sight. But that was just the beginning.

The following day, the streets were packed, full of WYD pilgrims from around the world. The normally secular Sydney was overrun by young Catholics singing their songs, praying aloud, and even breaking out into random group games. It didn't matter where you were from or what language you spoke; you still sang the songs or said the prayers. Just the community created by the pilgrims got me thinking, "It's pretty cool to be Catholic!" To be part of this community, this family, made me realize that I'm not alone in this journey as a young Catholic and that these 500,000 people have my back.

This was again revealed to me during a concert event after the Papal Arrival in Sydney called, "Receive the Power Live". It was a concert featuring Hillsong United and Canada's own Matt Maher as well as other artists from around the world. As part of Matt Maher's set, he called up one of Australia's bishops to lead the crowd of approximately 200,000 in Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. It was a really powerful sight just seeing this massive amount of people adoring the Eucharist. As His Grace lifted the Eucharist, something came over me. I was overwhelmed with the Spirit. I was in tears, singing louder than I have in my entire life. Then, I found myself embracing the members of not just my group, but members of other groups sharing in the joy of being in the presence of God. This incredible sense of community and family again showed me that it was OK to be a Catholic in a secular world; to be in rejoicing in God with your brothers and sisters even to the point where you're shedding tears.

One word to describe those few days of WYD: Awesome. Awesome is one of those overused words that everyone says to describe normally mundane things. But seeing hundreds of thousands of people being overwhelmed by the presence of God in the Eucharist was truly "awesome".

As incredible as rest of WYD was, it were these events that changed the way I looked at my faith. I realized that I wasn't alone, but I have at least 500,000 other people walking with me with whom I can share the faith. I am still really close with my longtime elementary and high school friends, but I've become more open with them about being Catholic and I'm so blest that I still have them supporting and even praying for me as I go on this pilgrimage to Madrid. To be among the over 1 million people at WYD 2011, will be another amazing experience and I look forward to sharing this with my brothers and sisters there.