Catholic campus ministers from across the United States gathered at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., from Aug. 3-6 for the 26th annual LAUNCH conference held by the Catholic Campus Ministry Association.
That association was founded in 1969 as a successor organization to the National Newman Chaplains Association, which had been established in 1950 to serve non-ordained Catholic ministers on U.S. campuses. The association now has roughly 700 members across the United States, representing roughly 30 percent of the nation’s Catholic campus ministers.
Presentations at the LAUNCH conference focused on the various challenges that many campus ministers face, including academic distress among students, omnipresent technology and artificial-intelligence tools that distract young people and hamper their ability to form meaningful in-person relationships or spend time in prayer, and political and ideological divisions among Catholic students.
Presenters based in the Archdiocese of Washington included Dr. Susan Timoney, associate dean for graduate ministerial studies at CUA; Pallottine Father Frank Donio, the founding director of the Catholic Apostolate Center; and Julie Cilano, CUA’s associate director of campus ministry.
The conference concluded with a keynote address by Rosie Chinea Shawver, the president and executive director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association, who offered advice to attendees on “how to thrive as a campus ministry professional.”
In her address, Shawver outlined five imperatives for campus ministers: that they be able to articulate in one sentence why they are attracted to ministry work; that they remember that they are the face of the Catholic Church on their university’s campus; that their leadership be rooted in prayer; that they be adept at fundraising and remember that it is a ministry, more about mission than about money; and that they constantly seek to continue learning.
“God is infinite,” Shawver said in her speech. “If we stop learning and growing, we become stagnant in our relationship with, and image of, him.”
She also stressed the importance of relationships, whether in fundraising, in working with colleagues in campus ministry, or in working with students.
Alison Hegarty, a newly installed campus minister at the University of Maryland’s Catholic Student Center, told the Catholic Standard that the LAUNCH conference had helped increase her confidence as she prepared for her first year on the job.
“It was a very positive experience,” Hegarty said. “I was happy, especially as a new campus minister, to receive this formation from people who have done this work for decades.”
Shawver was first drawn to campus ministry as a pre-medical student at the University of California in San Diego. Inspired by the example of campus ministers there, she came to appreciate the inflection point at which young adults find themselves during their college years, a period that forges their adult identities and often shapes their lives’ trajectories for decades to come. From the ages of 18 to 22 are “when a young adult either builds a faith that can hold the rest of their life, or walks away from one that never felt like their own,” Shawver wrote in an email to the Catholic Standard.
Shawver wrote that the greatest challenge facing Catholic students in this age of social media and artificial intelligence is “isolation wearing the costume of connection.”
“Students are more digitally ‘together’ than any generation before them and more relationally alone,” Shawver said. “Layer on that a mental health crisis that’s outpaced most parishes’ and campuses’ capacity to respond, and you get students who are hungry for something real but lack the language for what they’re missing. Campus ministers meet that need by doing what technology can’t: sitting across the table from a student and staying there.”
Hegarty echoed Shawver’s appraisal, noting that one of the most valuable tasks a campus minister can perform is to facilitate a culture of encounter among the student body, spreading the good news of the Gospel through relationship-building rather than proselytization.
Citing a talk given by Josh Dart, a consultant for the group Evangelical Catholic, on forming student leaders through discipleship, Hegarty said that “it all comes back to relationship and trust. You can’t share the Gospel with someone unless they know and trust you.”
In response to a question about the greatest challenge facing Catholic students today, Ogechi Akalegbere, the campus minister at Howard University’s Sister Thea Bowman Catholic Student Center, told the Catholic Standard that "I believe there is a lot of information available to college students about the faith, but our role pastorally is to help connect the intellectual knowledge to the graces gained from being a participant in the sacramental community college ministry provides. Those graces further equip them as students and in their discernment of how the Lord is calling them to go from passive faith into action.”
For all the challenges facing Catholic students, the Catholic Campus Ministry Association is keenly aware that campus ministers have their own crosses to bear. At the LAUNCH conference, speakers explored different issues affecting campus ministers, including spiritual exhaustion brought about by insufficient boundaries between ministers’ work and their personal spiritual lives.
“Campus ministers absorb an enormous amount of students' pain with very little support of their own,” Shawver told the Catholic Standard. “Many serve alone on a campus, with no peer down the hall and no supervisor who understands the work… Campus ministry cannot be sustained by people running on empty. Caring for the caregiver is not a side project for CCMA. It's core to keeping people on the front lines long enough to do the work.”
In her address, Shawver acknowledged that the nature of ministry work, focused on nurturing the deepest spiritual and emotional needs of young people, can make it difficult for campus ministers to find a proper balance between their work and their own spiritual lives. She urged conference attendees to reject the idea that setting boundaries between on-campus and off-campus life is selfish or withholding, and encouraged them to carve out space for their own Catholic lives off campus, particularly by finding their own parish and making a point of attending Mass there on a weekly basis.
At times campus ministers’ exhaustion can be augmented by a sense that their efforts to engage young people are futile. In the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, Cardinal Robert W. McElroy has identified one of the foremost pastoral priorities as “reversing the avalanche of young people leading the church,” a problem keenly felt by campus ministers in the archdiocese.
“Outreach, building relationships, and invitation is very important,” Hegarty said. “I think we often get so wrapped up in the ministry itself that we sometimes forget that there’s a whole campus full of students who might not be coming!” She stressed the importance of campus ministries having information tables, especially at the start of the academic year, when Catholic ministries might be able to reach new students with little prior exposure to the faith.
For all of the Church’s difficulty in retaining young people, Hegarty noted a countervailing trend of increased interest in the Church on college students’ part, with roughly 45 students receiving sacraments through the University of Maryland’s OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults) program at the 2026 Easter Vigil – compared with consistent numbers between 10 and 20 in previous years. These numbers are consistent with a strong year for OCIA programs across the Archdiocese of Washington, with the Catholic Standard reporting that 1,755 people received sacraments of initiation at this past Easter Vigil.
“This year, we already have 40 or 45 people interested, and this time last year there were only 20 to 25 interested, so we’ll see what happens this year!,” Hegarty said.
The conference ended on an uplifting note, as Shawver told attendees that their work on college campuses filled her with hope.
“This is God’s work, not our work,” Shawver said as the assembled ministers prepared to return to their campuses around the archdiocese and the country. “We are storytellers of hope.”
