Convention Draws Youths From Across Southland

Some danced in the aisles, wearing backward baseball caps and baggy pants. Thousands listened to a chillingly honest message about sex. Others shouted “Amen!” in a provocative workshop meant to root out racism.

More than 10,000 Catholic high school students converged on the Anaheim Convention Center on Thursday for Youth Day, kicking off the annual Religious Education Congress organized by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

The event runs through Sunday and is expected to draw 20,000 adult delegates from as far as Poland and Australia to discuss Scripture, spirituality, homosexuality, AIDS, religion on the Internet, and a host of other topics.

Youth Day--which organizers call the nation’s largest gathering of Catholic teenagers--highlighted one of the church’s greatest challenges: learning to speak a language understood by the young.

The day’s keynote speaker, Brian Johnson, associate director of youth for the Diocese of Galveston, Texas, worked the crowd with storytelling, soulful singing and some hip dance moves. He opened the congress with a rousing call for the attendees to find the church in their hearts and live by their beliefs.

“If you’re in a situation that brings you down, if you’re with friends who aren’t really your friends and stab you in the back, you’ve got to change that,” he told them. “It doesn’t happen overnight and it takes work. But God is good all the time. If you walk out of here today with that theme, know that everything is going to be all right.”

Luke Perez, a 16-year-old from St. Patrick’s Church in Moreno Valley, was attending the event for the third time. He leaped from his seat to dance to the religious rock music. “You get to meet a bunch of youth that share your common faith, and it’s a good safe environment,” Perez said. “And I love the music.”

Joyce Fitzgerald, an event organizer with the archdiocese, estimated that two-thirds of the Catholic churches and high schools from the Los Angeles region were represented.

Other attendees came from as far as Brooklyn and Iowa.

“It’s fun. It’s an experience,” said Jesse Garcia, 15, from All Souls Church in Alhambra. One reason for attending, he said: “A lot of girls.”

“There’s God and girls,” added Luis Gracia, 16. “A little bit of both.”

Their group, wearing matching blue T-shirts from their church’s youth ministry, had chosen to attend one of the morning’s more provocative workshops: “Sex Has a Price Tag,” a hard-hitting presentation by Pamela E. Stenzel about pregnancy, intimacy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Stenzel, who founded the Minnesota-based Straight Talk to educate teenagers about sexuality “and the importance of chastity” told the thousands in the arena that she wasn’t there to make choices for them.

Speaking of her experience as a pregnancy counselor, however, she shared the pain of girls who had gotten pregnant and sought abortions and of teenagers who raised their children below the poverty line or found themselves paying child support from meager salaries earned flipping burgers. But her talk was far from prudish.

Sex, she told them, “is a good thing,” created by God. “It’s not a horrible thing that we can’t talk about in church. And God wants to give you the best sex, the best intimacy and the best marriage. But because God is good, he gave you some boundaries to protect yourself.”

Marriage, she said, is that boundary, “but I know a lot of you sitting there don’t believe that.”

In a smaller gathering, Paul Ybarra Florez, director of youth ministry for the diocese of Lubbock, Texas, challenged teenagers to face their racial prejudices.

Ybarra made a list of derogative names for whites, blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans, drawing from the audience’s wealth of knowledge.

“How is it that we, who believe in Jesus, continue to use these words every day of the week?” he asked, calling on the mixed race audience to “uncondition” themselves and explore worlds different from their own.

Other workshops included one on averting gang violence by Father Gregory J. Boyle, former pastor of East Los Angeles’ Dolores Mission Church. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony presided over a liturgy.

The tone of the event, which continues through Sunday for adults, has yearly drawn the ire of conservative Catholics, who plan to picket the congress today as “hazardous to the faith of young Catholics.”

In an editorial last week, Mahony stressed that all congress speakers come “fully approved by the diocesan bishop where he or she lives” in order to “assure the fullest level of authentic Catholic teaching.”