HUNTLEY—The Huntley audience seemed at times to extend out from those located in the front rows in Ottawa, Canada, as the opening band, Connor George and his team, opened the Saturday session of the New Evangelization Summit on April 25, broadcast to 20 sites including St. Mary Parish, here.

Seventy-five people at St. Mary Church hall spent Saturday, and many of them Friday evening, hearing presentations by a treasure trove of Catholic speakers.

Mary George, a parishioner at St. Rita of Cascia Parish in Aurora, came both to be inspired and to pray for her friend, JoEllen Gregus.

Gregus was the only female speaker in the line-up of “big guns,” said George, and the only one with local ties.

Gregus works in adult evangelization at her parish, St. Thomas the Apostle in Crystal Lake, and serves as operations director for Light of the World Evangelization Ministries.

As she kicked off the Saturday morning talks, Gregus said she was there to speak of how LOTW was evangelizing adults in about 100 parishes in North America.

George said Friday’s speakers, Dr. Scott Hahn and Ken Yasinski, had been both “awesome” and “inspirational.”

Dr. Hahn looked at how “our relationship with Christ and His Church is like a marriage … and how much we need to nurture that relationship,” she said.

Lauren McCracken of St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, also “really enjoyed” the Friday evening speakers. Her first memory of Dr. Hahn’s talk was how “before the New Testament was a book, the New Testament was the Eucharist.”

Phil Ferrari, a St. Mary, Huntley parishioner, said he was seeing the new evangelization as a matter of creating “a great marketing program to bring new people in” and to strength the faith of those already active in their parishes. “I never looked at (evangelization) the way (Yasinski) presented it,” Ferrari said.
“Sainthood is now … sainthood is our responsibility,” he quoted, adding, “We are like miniature missionaries … That’s the way I look at it. The Catholic religion today is not an easy sell. It’s not easy to get into conversations” with people who don’t want to hear about it. “You have to be a technician, a salesman (and) a diplomat” to figure out how to ease into such conversations, he said.

Della DeLaCruz and her friend Anita Pobre also are members of St. Mary in Huntley.

Pobre compared Yasinski to “a young Scott Hahn,” saying his thoughts could relate to young adults and also people her age. DeLaCruz noted Yaskinski’s insistence that “sainthood is now!”

In approaching the topic of evangelization with her own family in mind, Pobre noted that Bishop David Malloy’s homily that morning at Mass supported her thought that “you can start with your family.”

Bishop Malloy served as the main celebrant at the 8 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s that morning, devoting his homily to the New Evangelization. He expressed how amazing is the reality that “some of the values that should be closest (to us) are met with indifference (as though) from a distance” by so many in society today.

Although, he said, some lament that all would be fixed “if only the Church would change,” he noted that “many are falling away simply because they never acquired, or have lost interest in, Jesus Christ – the only one who really matters.”

What is “central” to the New Evangelization, he said, is “What is the state of our witness to Christ … as individuals, as parishes, as a diocese and as (the whole) Church?”

Bishop Malloy pointed to prayer, including Mass, to confession, to sacrifice for the poor, to showing our faith to errant family members, saying that “all these end up being an act of witness to Christ.” He called for the need to be ready to express the Church’s moral teachings and living such “things that are different” from what is taught in secular society.

“Sometimes I think … we have to get over being afraid to speak out … It is the Church that will set us free,” he said. “It is certainly my hope and prayer that the New Evangelization will move all of us closer to that goal.”

Participants in the New Evangelization Summit hailed from 13 dioceses in Canada and eight in the United States. Additional speakers at the summit were Dr. Ralph Martin, Father Michael Gaitley, Father James Mallon, Patrick Coffin and Michael Dopp, who founded this first-ever Catholic summit.