Sharing joy through service volunteering at World Youth Day
Colette Liddy, a parishioner at St. Aloysius in Caldwell, was one of the 25,000 who attended World Youth Day as a volunteer.
Liddy said she saw the call for volunteers in the spring and put in the application. Her pastor, Msgr. Robert Emery provided the recommendation.
“Over the years, I have had sisters, a brother, and a niece who have gone to World Youth Days in Denver, Rome, Paris, and Toronto so I knew how wonderful World Youth Days were, and I wanted to serve in any way I could,” said Liddy, who is director of News and Media Relations at Caldwell University.
After being accepted, she spent the summer taking modules of training at home.
Liddy got her assignment upon arrival in Lisbon, Portugal, and was stationed at Reconciliation Park at the City of Joy, which included “a chapel, Forgiveness Park, a vocational fair, talks of joy, and more,” she said.
“It was a gift to volunteer in Reconciliation Park where confessions were offered to pilgrims in multiple languages,” Liddy said. “I was part of the team that worked in one of the tents checking out the priests after they heard the confessions. It was a beautiful experience to speak to so many priests from so many ends of the earth and to work with volunteers from around the world.”
Prisoners made the 150 confessionals in three Portuguese prisons. Pope Francis also heard the confessions of three young people there.
Liddy stayed with other volunteers from around the world at a former Augustinian convent overlooking the Tagus River run by a husband-and-wife team. The convent was built in the 1700s and was dissolved during the extinction of the religious orders in 1834.
Next door was St. Bartolomeu Church where Liddy happened to walk into when a Syro-Malabar group was holding one of the World Youth Day youth discussions. They then celebrated the Qurbana — the Eucharistic liturgy as celebrated in East Syriac Christianity.
“That was my first time attending a Qurbana and it was a beautiful experience,” Liddy said.
Everywhere you looked in the city there were opportunities for spiritual discussion and prayer, Liddy said.
She said she went in the spirit of sharing joy and service but was most moved by the youths’ joy of service, she said. Two-thirds of the volunteers were women with an average age of 28 years old.
“Before I went on the trip, a priest told me that it was John Paul II’s vision that young people would run WYD. This was quite my experience,” Liddy said. “They took on their leadership responsibilities beautifully. They lived out the spirit and the culture that we learned about in the volunteer trainings, which was to have a clean heart in communicating and working with people. To not get exasperated with the problems but to concentrate on kindness and the heart of the other. This was so evident among the young organizers.”
She reflected on what Pope Francis said of the young on his flight press conference home. “The young people are a surprise. Young people are young, they act youthful, life is like that. But they are seeking to look forward. And they are the future. The idea is to accompany them. The problem is knowing how to accompany them.”
Although Liddy works with youth through her job at Caldwell University, she agrees with Pope Francis that knowing how to accompany them is a challenge, but an exciting one.
“We need to be honest with young people, to show them the truth. And then let them bring their own creativity and dreams into the work and accompany them as they go forward.”
Pope Francis ended World Youth Day at a Mass with an estimated 1.5 million people. At the end, he had a public address with the nearly 25,000 volunteers who kept the international event running from start to finish.
Featured image: Colette Liddyat World Youth Day with the confessionals in the background. (Courtesy Colette Liddy)
