By Amy White 
The Texas Catholic

FRISCO — Over a thousand youth from the Catholic Diocese of Dallas, plus hundreds of chaperones and volunteers, filled the Embassy Suites by Hilton Dallas Frisco Hotel & Convention Center with the buzz of worship and fellowship during this year’s Dallas Catholic Youth Conference, Feb. 16-18.

“We’re at our largest this year,” said Jacob Coffman, associate director of content development for the Youth, Young Adult, and Campus Ministries office of the Diocese of Dallas. “Our total representation is right under 1,500 with all our volunteers, our priests, our speakers, and everybody.”

The Dallas Catholic Youth Conference, or DCYC, is a weekend conference hosted annually by the Diocese of Dallas Office of Youth, Young Adult, and Campus Ministries. The conference is meant to nourish the faith of high school youth from parishes within the diocese, bringing them together in prayer and fellowship.

“You have some of these parishes that have never interacted with each other in the same environment for one weekend,” Coffman said, adding that several parishes who have not previously participated in DCYC have joined the conference this year. “From all the way down to Corsicana to Sherman, to Irving to Terrell, we’re seeing all these communities come together for the first time, and they get to be together and worship the Lord.”

Paul Bianchi, director of evangelization at All Saints Catholic Community and leader of the production team at DCYC, remembers when the conference began in the Diocese of Dallas 13 years ago.

“I moved here from the Diocese of Galveston-Houston and was involved in the diocesan conference there and was kind of surprised to find out that the Diocese of Dallas did not have a diocesan youth conference,” Bianchi said. He recalled speaking with Jason Deuterman and Susan Dorfmeister to plan a youth conference for the diocese. “We all sat down, and we started brainstorming and got the conference started.”

Since then, Bianchi has continued to be involved with DCYC.

“I think the most important thing, the most beneficial thing, is for young Catholic people to know that they’re not alone,” Bianchi said. “We cover a huge amount of area in the Diocese of Dallas; and so, this creates a very unique opportunity for all of those young people to come together and pray together and worship together and realize that they’re not alone in the diocese.”

As in past years, this year’s DCYC included adoration, confession, and testimonies about living out the Catholic faith. Gian Gamboa, Mari Pablo, and Ali Hoffman were among this year’s conference speakers.

“We’ve got incredible music from the Dave Moore Band,” Bianchi said. “We have engaging keynote speakers who talk about their journey in faith life. We have breakout sessions that do an incredible job of covering a variety of topics that the young people deal with in their daily lives. We have service projects that happen while we’re out here.”

One of the service projects available to youth and volunteers at DCYC was a partnership with Catholic Charities Dallas to provide food for the hungry in the community.

“This year is the second year [we’ve had] our food drive competition with Catholic Charities Dallas,” said Devyn Buschow, the parish relations program manager at Catholic Charities Dallas and co-coordinator of the peripheral team for DCYC. “We’ve always partnered to do some sort of service projects… Last year is the first year we decided to make it a competition, and we collected almost 2,000 pounds of food.”

The winners of this year’s canned food drive competition at DCYC were St. Francis of Assisi in Lancaster, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Our Lady of The Lake in the categories of most pounds of food overall, most pounds of food per person, and best canned food sculpture respectively. The winners received a trophy, made of spray-painted cans, during a trophy presentation on the last day of the conference.

Buschow says she is excited “knowing that all that food will go to all the people that need it.” She said the cans collected during the conference are distributed to Catholic Charities Dallas’ food pantries and to the North Texas Food Bank to serve those who are struggling for food. Overall, 6,176 pounds of food were donated at this year’s DCYC.

Retrospection and prayer
The theme of this year’s Dallas Catholic Youth Conference was “retrospect,” with a focus on the mysteries of the Triduum and how they affect our lives today.

“We’re taking the Triduum,” Coffman said, “and we’re unpacking it throughout the entire weekend, saying these are not just simple stories that we read one time of the year at the church, or we read in our scriptures, but these are stories that are meant for us to live in a particular way and challenge us to do something in our life today.

“We’re entering into the holiest time of the year and we’re preparing, and that’s what Lent is. So, let’s take a moment and actually talk about that before we go on this journey. We’re about to enter a desert, so let’s be prepared to enter that desert.”

Teens prepared to “enter the desert” not only by attending talks which walked them through the pascal mystery but also by diving deeply into prayer.

“This year, we [had] a time slot that’s just for prayer workshops to learn about different types of ways to pray,” Buschow said, “There’s praying with service; there’s how to pray for others; there’s how to pray when we don’t want to pray; and the teens can look at the topics and discern where they want to go.”

This year, the DCYC team intentionally wrapped the event in prayer, Coffman said, praying novenas leading up to the conference and making prayer opportunities readily available to teens during the weekend.

“We want our young people to not only walk away with learning a little bit more about their faith from our dynamic speakers, but they’re able to encounter and experience the Lord,” Coffman said. “These young people are going through school, which is work to them, plus sports, plus preparing for college, plus everything else… You see them unpack that through the weekend and see them kind of relieve that burden.”

The impact 
Luke Patterson, a sophomore at Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas who came to the conference with St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, attended DCYC for the second time this year. This time, he served on the A-Team, the high school leadership team that assists with the conference.

“Before we came, [the A-Team] prayed over every single chair in the big assembly room,” Patterson said. “I was like ‘Lord, I pray for this person. May they find the courage to seek you or be able to find you better’… That was a beautiful thing that we did.”

Patterson shared that the conference helped him grow in his friendships with other young people in the diocese and in his personal relationship with Christ.

“Coming to things like this, it’s just helped me realize even more that God is there, and He wants to be your best friend,” Patterson said. “I can take Him with me throughout everything and the hardships of junior year.”

Another teen, Lizzie Knode, a ninth-grade parishioner of St. Mark the Evangelist, said that attending DCYC this year helped her realize the beauty of the Eucharist in a profound way.

“During the consecration, I was in tears,” she shared. “He’s with me. He’s hugging my heart right now, saying He loves me, holding me in His arms… I’m definitely going to go to my mom and tell her I want to do the Eucharistic Revival thing.”

Hayden Olson, a sophomore student, came to DCYC for the first time this year with St. Francis of Assisi in Frisco.

“It’s been super good, because they’ve filled the days with a ton of information,” Olson said. “It’s been super fulfilling being able to be with the Lord so much in a short period of time.”

Olson said the conference helped her connect with other young people in her parish.
“I have actually met a ton of people in my church that I didn’t know before, which is really cool,” she said, “and they brought up a youth group which is on Sunday nights, and I was like, I’m totally in.”

Zoie Garcia, 17, from St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, said her experience at DCYC last year is the reason she is entering the faith this year.

“I was nervous. I had never been away from my parents,” she said, “but I came and I ended up never wanting to leave… It was my first time at adoration. And I don’t think people understand how important and how special adoration is. It’s beautiful. And it was just—it was life changing.”

Garcia will be baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church during this upcoming Easter vigil.

“I realized this is where I want to be. I want to be Catholic,” she said. “I want to spread the message to people who go to things like these, that when you come to these things, it’s going to change your life.”