On a cool July evening at the foot of Primrose Hill, a local passersby might be taken aback to witness a group of 60 American teenage boys struggle in the attempt to learn the game of rugby from a Black Friar Dominican in full habit.  For any one of the 60 boys, however, the sight is as natural as the summer’s sun that sets behind the pitch.

I recently returned from chaperoning these students from Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida, as we journeyed on a pilgrimage to the sites and shrines of the Catholic Martyrs of England.  In every city, kneeling at the altar, adoring in the chapel, praying in the abbey, we were the source of many stares from priests and nuns, lords and farmers, and every person we met in the streets.  The frequent message relayed to the adults in the group was disbelief that teenage boys could possibly care about faith in God, and, what is more, could be so joyous in doing so.

This joy is the joy found in the new evangelization called for by Pope Saint John Paul II.  It is the joy that comes from a faith lived, and it is one that is commonplace in young Catholics.  Though I have only taught theology for three years in the Catholic school system, I have witnessed a phenomenon that continues to grow—where parents were once the primary educators of faith in their children, the roles have been categorically reversed.

Young Catholics are on fire for the faith and in turn are rekindling that flame in their parents.  I have seen a father kneel in the confessional for the first time in multiple decades because his daughter told him of the peace she finds in the sacrament.  I have seen divorced families put aside their feuds to reunite for their son’s Baptism and Confirmation.  I have seen a mother, who had renounced her faith in anger over Church teaching, return to the Eucharist because her son begged her to attend Mass.  In this new evangelization, children are evangelizing their parents, who are converted by the joy of a faith lived.

The secret to this successful parental evangelization is found in what John Paul II described as “a faith, which is conscious and personally lived.”  The key word here, the one that comes naturally to young Catholics, is “lived.”  A faith that is alive sees no line of demarcation between prayer and play.  That a group of 60 high school boys at one moment kneel in prayer at the shrine of the Tyburn Martyrs and the next moment are learning to play rugby from a Dominican friar does not in the least bit shock or offend, but rather seems to fit naturally in the lives of young Catholics.  Conversely, the curiosity of the adult habit is to compartmentalize our human activities, linking interest A to interest B only peripherally—faith, in particular, is something set outside the self.  It is in contrast to this ethos that makes the joy of young Catholics so impelling for the older generation.  

When faith proceeds from the interior life of man, as in the case of my high school students and many young Catholics, it is infectious; precisely because of this, it gives birth to genuine joy in the center of the self—the soul.  This is the joy of Christ, which should always be set at the center, not placed in a personal periphery.  In this manner, parents are rediscovering the faith in their own children, the very children Christ so often appealed to in the Gospels.

The goal of the new evangelization, as stated by our two previous popes, is to make “the voice of the Lord accessible and comprehensible” so as to “lead others to the Truth that is Christ,” as Benedict XVI put it.  Children are making the Lord’s voice heard in their prayer and in their play, leading their parents to the Truth that is Christ.

Peter Flores graduated from Notre Dame in 2013 and currently teaches theology at Mount Carmel Academy in New Orleans.