American outreach FOCUS withdraws its missionaries from Europe

The Federation of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) has decided to withdraw its missionaries from Europe at the end of this academic year. This sudden and surprising decision will have a concerning impact on the services they provide on campuses in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.

FOCUS (which is unrelated to the Irish housing charity founded by Sr Stan) is an American mission outreach specifically to university students. It started in the late 1990s in response to St Pope John Paul II’s call for a New Evangelisation.

One of the founders, Curtis Martin, had been involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, a well-known Evangelical Protestant movement.

However, after attending a Catholic retreat at his mother’s insistence, he realised the centrality of the Eucharist and returned to the faith of his birth. The effectiveness of Campus Crusade’s methods, particularly its use of friendship as a vehicle for evangelisation, remained with him.

He began to reflect on how Jesus invested in a small group of disciples at the beginning of his mission. He saw that echoed in how St Ignatius of Loyola concentrated on two friends when founding the Jesuits – St Francis Xavier and St Peter Faber.

This led to a central concept in FOCUS today – spiritual multiplication. By befriending and making disciples of a few, who then, in turn, reach out to others, grace is multiplied.

FOCUS

FOCUS trains young people, mostly recent graduates, to work on campuses. These missionaries build genuine friendships with students and then invite them to small Bible study groups, fostering strong bonds and greater knowledge of Jesus and the gospel.

There has been a FOCUS presence in UCD for ten years, and for a shorter time in Belfast and Cork. The teams, which ideally should consist of four members, two men and two women, have missionaries from the US working alongside Irish people.

All the missionaries fundraise their own salaries. While this model is more common in the US, it is virtually unknown in Ireland.

One of our daughters worked as a FOCUS missionary for two years. She found fundraising deeply stressful.

While the diocese where the university is situated and the university itself are supposed to contribute to FOCUS, this did not always happen in Ireland.

I saw young people not only return to their faith but develop a deep relationship with Jesus”

Even when it did, these funds do not go to pay missionaries. This lets the Irish Church off the hook when it comes to investing in youth ministry in a consistent, ongoing fashion.

Given that my daughter first got involved in FOCUS as a student and subsequently volunteered with it, I am understandably biased in its favour. Nonetheless, if ‘by their fruits shall you know them,’ the fruits were very impressive.

I saw young people not only return to their faith but develop a deep relationship with Jesus. Some lives were transformed. I am very sad that FOCUS is withdrawing.

So why is it happening? It became increasingly difficult to secure visas for the volunteers.

Missionaries and ministry are not exactly high on the list of essential workers the State wishes to attract.

I believe FOCUS also underestimated the difficulties of operating in Europe. (They have missionaries on a few campuses in Austria and Germany as well as Ireland.)

The depth of disillusionment with institutional religion and lack of interest in Catholicism is much greater in Europe than in the US.

As a result, the missionaries were working flat out to break down barriers. They sometimes drove themselves to exhaustion. The teams tended to be young, so sometimes team directors lacked the experience to see when burnout was fast approaching.

Also, there are limits to the number of deep friendships that any person can sustain, but the model is based on befriending.

It still was a shock when FOCUS decided its European mission was unsustainable. It has left many young missionaries unsure of their future.

FOCUS is not without its critics. Some Irish Catholics feel that FOCUS is too conservative. FOCUS prefers to call itself dynamically orthodox.

Criticism

In my experience, young people today, especially young men, are seeking out orthodox Catholicism because they are dismissive of Catholicism-lite, which offers them little challenge or meaning.

The fundraising model for salaries also raised eyebrows. But the Irish Church has not been very willing to pay living wages to young people in ministry.

The Irish Church now needs to step up and perhaps offer some of the Irish FOCUS missionaries’ contracts and institutional support to enable them to continue their work.

University chaplains, including priests, are often exceptional people, but they cannot do this work alone.

More broadly, the Church needs to prioritise lay-led peer ministry to young people outside universities, too. The child abuse scandals and weak commitment to faith among parents and teachers mean that a generation has not been evangelised. That means the Great Commission is being ignored within even those already baptised.