October 22, 2025

By Keith Benman
Contributing Writer

A revived Diocesan Youth Council aims to meet youngsters where they are in the diocese – and where they are is social media.

A recent Youth Leadership Weekend at Camp Guggenheim to kick off the effort featured talks, exercises, games, prayer and the production of hundreds of videos and photos – some already shared on the diocesan youth ministry’s Instagram page and the diocesan Facebook page.

“Their world has become something that fits in their pocket,” said Youth Ministry Director Patrick Looby of social media and its consumption on smartphones.

How to use social media for good – and avoid the bad – is one of the most critical issues the revived youth council will tackle.

“These phones and these things that we are being inundated with are having an effect on us spiritually,” Looby said.

“It is more crucial than ever to have something like a Diocesan Youth Council for kids to be able express what is actually happening to them, what’s going on, what are the causes,” he added.

The Youth Leadership Weekend at Camp Guggenheim Sept. 19-21 was a good start. Some 55 high-school age youngsters from around the diocese were made honorary members of the Diocesan Youth Council. At last count, 30 of those had already done final sign-ups to serve as youth council members at large.

And now, the youth ministry is issuing an open call across the diocese and beyond for more young people to serve on the council.

The Diocesan Youth Council has four goals:
• Amplify the voices of young Catholics.
• Advise diocesan staff and parish leaders on the spiritual and social needs of youth.
• Promote events and initiatives that foster faith, friendship and service.
• Build bridges between parishes, schools and communities – Catholic and Christian alike.

Looby is emphasizing the new council is not there to replace youth programs already underway in parishes. In fact, that is where the new youth council is finding its inspiration. It plans to enhance, expand and tie together opportunities at the parish level.

“It’s a grass-roots, ground-up approach to get kids to feel like they are a part of something,” Looby said.

There will also be regional representatives chosen, and each deanery of the diocese will nominate two young people to serve on an executive council.

Duties for at-large members are praying daily for the council’s mission and success, attending two youth council meetings per year either in person or virtually, participating in two youth council events, helping promote those events in the parishes and being active in your own parish.

The activities of previous diocesan youth councils waxed and waned over the years, Looby said. When he was in high school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was a member. But the COVID pandemic and the limited activities it allowed for seemed to signal the end for the youth council.

Following Bishop Terry R. LaValley’s vision for youth evangelization, the council’s revival was one of the first projects Looby started planning when he took up the post of diocesan director of youth and campus ministry last November. He said the council and its input are needed now more than ever.

“For a long time you could assume that the problems of young people were exactly the same problems you dealt with when you were a young person,” Looby said. “But I would say, with just the explosion of technology, that is no longer the case. Everyone working with young people today is doing so blind.”

A youth ministry application form that can be filled out online by young people and their parents is available at https://www.rcdony.org/dyc. The council is open to Catholic high school students living in the diocese (at-large member), Catholic high school students living outside the diocese (Ambassador member), as well as non-Catholic Christian high school students (ecumenical members).