Steubenville Conferences 'radically' change participants' lives, say organizers

(OSV News) -- For 50 years, the Steubenville Conferences have been forming teens in the faith and deepening adults' faith journeys.

The summer conferences, which sprouted from a single priests' retreat in 1975, have been known to make an impact on service to the U.S. church in parishes, dioceses and national apostolates.

Four youth conferences, and all six of the adult conferences this year, are on the campus of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, where the series started. The rest of the 15 youth meetings are happening across the country and in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Between 600 to 4,500 attend these, according to organizers.

They said adult conferences draw 150 to 900 participants and include a weeklong retreat for priests, deacons and seminarians, and three intensive days for the laity. Some lay conference topics include growing one's faith with Scripture, dealing with the culture through faith and the Holy Spirit's healing work in one's life.

For high school-age young people, organizers create a three-day program built around the person of Jesus Christ, according to Franciscan Father Dave Pivonka, who directed the conferences for 30 years. Father Pivonka, president of Franciscan University, also presents at the conferences.

He said youth come to know the love of God in the proclamation and preaching of the Gospel, or "kerygma" (proclaiming God's kingdom, Jesus' saving death on the cross and the meaning of a life in Christ), raising awareness of the Real Presence at Mass and adoration, "and that's the extent of it. God does really great works in the power of the Holy Spirit."

"Young people love to have the bar raised for them," he told OSV News. "We're not compromising. We speak about eternal realities, we speak about sin and we speak about mercy. And when presented with the entire Gospel, our experience is, the young people actually respond quite beautifully. So you'll find … (people) that are in their 60s that 45 years ago had the encounter with the Lord that radically changed their lives."

Father Pivonka said clergy specifically requested that youth conferences be started at their first retreat at Franciscan 50 years ago. Every year since, the school has hosted the conferences, which officials said have grown significantly.

Surveys in 2024 by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate show 15% of seminarians to be ordained that year had attended a Steubenville youth conference and 14% of religious who made solemn professions of vows then also attended a conference.

Brian Kissinger, executive director of Steubenville Conferences, said many who staffed and led sessions at last year's National Eucharistic Congress, such as known Catholicpersonalities Father Josh Johnson, Heather Khym of the Abiding Together podcast and Catholic media writer and host Katie McGrady, had attended the conferences as teens.

Kissinger grew up in the city of Steubenville, which is in eastern Ohio. He said the conferences have been part of his life, "for as long as I've been alive." Kissinger, 43, attended his first conference when he was 3 weeks old, he recounted to OSV News, when his parents brought him along. In high school, he attended them multiple times, helped out during his college years and was a conference host for 17 years until he became executive director.

"We try to wrap our annual theme around the questions that seem to be surfacing right now. We believe that, of course, Jesus Christ is the answer to all of our questions, always," he said.

For instance, he said, this year's theme "consumed" is a take on God's all-consuming love as found in Deuteronomy 4:24.They explore what young people are consumed by nowadays: social media, too much "screen time" and seeking popularity, said Kissinger. And at the conferences, they find the antidote is God, who "wants to consume us in a way that doesn't take away our freedom or individuality, but really makes us fully alive."

Annaleigh Gidosh said she had planned to purposely "be reckless" once she entered high school, after years of strict Catholic schooling. But, the summer before high school, a deacon at her parish convinced her father to have her join a Steubenville conference at the last minute.

Gidosh, 33, said it "changed (her) life." The newly assigned youth minister at her parish in Orefield, Pennsylvania, said after attending adoration and then going to confession, she walked into the Portiuncula chapel, a replica of the chapel near Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis of Assisi first heard God tell him to rebuild his church, on Steubenville's campus. There, she laid down on the floor "and told God that I was going to serve him and that I was going to make an oath to continue to serve him for the rest of my life."

Gidosh, also a communications specialist at the Diocese of Allentown, Pennsylvania, said at the conference she discovered that the God she read about in Scripture was real, he was not a figment of her imagination. After this experience, she suspected she became the most prayerful student at her high school, leading her volleyball team in prayer before every game, and being the go-to friend for prayer advice.

This year, she brought her first group of 35 kids from the diocese to a Steubenville conference.

"Many (are) from public schools and each of these kids came away from this experience transformed. They were so thankful to get the opportunity to go … and they're excited to engage with each other back here. … I am already providing them with opportunities for adoration, music and then a Bible study and social afterwards," said Gidosh.

Continuing with the themes of the conference afterward has been Erica McCleskey's main focus, ever since attending her first meeting two years ago. She said she and five other women who went to a "Power and Purpose" conference formed a group of now one to two dozen women for a monthly "peace, power and purpose" meeting. They listen to Catholic podcasts and deepen their faith together. Early on, McCleskey said, they watched breakout session videos from the conference.

McCleskey, 44, who lives near Raleigh, North Carolina, told OSV News that she was a Sunday Mass-only Catholic, but then she started joining Bible study groups in 2019 before attending the conference in 2022. She said since that conference she has felt compelled to share what she experienced when her senses were awakened during adoration and Father Pivonka walked through the room holding the Blessed Sacrament inside a monstrance.

"You have the music, you have the incense, and the visual, and it is just so powerful," she said. "I was kneeling. And when he passed, I just fell flat on my face and I didn't get hurt or anything, but I was just in such peace and calm. Like he (God) was with me and he overpowered me and he was just so loving and peaceful and just like, you can't describe it except using those words and it still doesn't do it justice."

McCleskey said she learned the true meaning of the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and her faith life grew exponentially after that. She said God's love is real, that she is reassured of being able to go back to him always even after turning her back on him.

Today, she goes to daily Mass, has a spiritual director and said when life becomes more mundane and less like the electrifying conference experience, she can always do standard devotions such as the rosary or Divine Mercy chaplet, all while continuing to invite more and more people to her faith-sharing group.

Kissinger, the executive director, said technology makes the content of the Steubenville Conferences accessible to anyone. But being together in the faith is essential.

He said, "You cannot replicate the in-person experience or just the experience of community, especially in a time when many of us, young and old, feel like we are the only ones remaining faithful or remaining in the heart of the church, as we see the culture kind of going here or there."

Kissinger said he was "excited to see what the Lord has in store for the next 50 years."