“It’s free! All you have to do is……”. How familiar we are with these opening words of commercials that capture our attention and elicit our response. How easily we are seduced by the prospect of gaining something desirable that is also free. Knowing what’s at stake, wise mothers caution their young children that in life the only thing free is love.
“Free love”. For those of us who were part of the college scene in the 1960s this phrase had a very different implication than it does for a national movement that began on a college campus three decades later, a movement now supported by many of the donors in the NCCF community.
FOCUS – the Fellowship of Catholic University Students – which was founded by Curtis Martin in 1998 at Benedictine Collete in Atchinson with two missionaries – now has over one thousand missionaries serving more than 250 parishes and universities across the country in forty-eight states.
As its website states (FOCUS.org): “Encouraged and driven by Pope St. John Paul II’s call to a New Evangelization and encouraged with steadfast hope to change the culture for Christ, FOCUS began humbly as the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. What started as a small movement on college campuses quickly grew into a mission marked by clarity and conviction – men and women stepping onto the spiritual battlefield with courage and faith. Since then, FOCUS missionaries have spread the gospel to hundreds of thousands of college students through on-campus outreach, Bible studies, discipleship, mission trips, national conferences, and more”.
FOCUS exercises its mission by training missionary volunteers who commit to a minimum of two years of service in universities and now also in parishes. Following the evangelizing model of Jesus and in response to the Great commission (Mt. 28:19), these missionaries ‘meet in friendship’ with students or fellow parishioners to share the Gospel message, to accompany them and inspire them on their own faith journeys, and to encourage lives of virtue and excellence.
Clearly, the fire of the ‘new evangelization’ Pope John Paul II predicted at the end of the last century (and millennium) has been lit, and its flame is being carried by these young men and women who have discovered and are eager to share the source of authentic ‘free love’.
Maybe some of us 1960s college students had to discover the ‘cost’ of free love before opening our hearts and minds to the good news of True Love. Isn’t it the case that for some of us the advance of the Kingdom has entailed learning the hard way.
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