Since 2007, children and teens in parishes across the Archdiocese of Chicago have had the opportunity to learn more about their faith, engage in meaningful prayer and worship and have fun with their peers through “Totus Tuus,” a program offered through the archdiocese’s Office for Vocations.
But the program, delivered to parishes by young adult missionaries, might be more important for those who deliver it than for those who receive it.
“That’s the secret of Totus Tuus,” said Father Bobby Krueger, pastor of Blessed Miguel Pro Parish in Berwyn. “Everyone thinks of it as a summer camp for kids, but it’s really a formation program for the missionaries.”
Krueger should know. He was discerning his vocation to the priesthood as a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 when he learned about the program at a conference and applied to be a Totus Tuus missionary in Denver.
He spent the summer in the program there, then returned home and told Father Joe Noonan, then the director of vocations for the Archdiocese of Chicago, that it should be done here as well.
Krueger returned to the Archdiocese of Denver as a missionary the following year, before being one of the first missionaries in the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2007, as a seminarian at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary.
Since he was ordained in 2012, he has invited Totus Tuus missionaries to every parish he was assigned to. This year, so many families signed up that Blessed Miguel Pro Parish hosted two teams of four missionaries.
Father Tim Monahan, director of the Office for Vocations, said it’s a “both/and” when it comes to who benefits most from Totus Tuus.
“We’ve seen some really good things come out of Totus Tuus,” Monahan said, including missionaries who first experienced the program as students. “It’s really cool for us to hear from missionaries who experienced Totus Tuus as a student and said, ‘I want to do that one day. I want to be a missionary.’”
For Monahan, the primary benefit of Totus Tuus is it’s emphasis on evangelization. Parishes that have embraced it, and have embraced other evangelization efforts such as Alpha, will be stronger in the long term because they are doing what they are meant to do. Teaching college students, or young adults just out of college, how to be evangelizers will bear fruit for decades, he said.
“It’s worthwhile for the archdiocese to invest in teaching college students and giving then experience in evangelization,” he said. “The benefit that brings to our parishes is that we have students who are receiving the gift of being evangelized, and they’re seeing the fruits of that.”
At the same time, Totus Tuus is an ideal program for seminarians and men discerning whether they have a call to priesthood, because missionaries get an up close view of what it’s like to be a diocesan priest.
The program, named for Pope John Paul II’s motto “totally yours,” was founded and is coordinated by the Archdiocese of Wichita, Kansas, and offers a curriculum that rotates through different parts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and different mysteries of the rosary.
Missionaries gather for two weeks of formation before spending six weeks in a different parish each week.
For the past several years, the archdiocese has run the program with four teams of missionaries, with each team consisting of two men and two women, said Kathryn Hazen, who coordinates Totus Tuus for the vocations office.
Parishes hosting Totus Tuus are asked to find two parish families to host the missionaries in their homes — one for the men and one for the women. Other families are invited to host the mission teams for meals.
The missionaries then engage the children and teens in activity and prayer, as well as committing to private prayer and prayer within their own small community.
Aidan Beckett, an economics student at the University of Illinois, is discerning whether he is called to priesthood. This summer, he served on a team with Cody Beeber, entering his second discipleship year at Mundelein Seminary, along with Margaret McGovern, a student at Dayton University, and Julia Widhalm, a student at Hillsdale College.
Beeber said he decided to be a Totus Tuus missionary this year because it’s something seminarians in the archdiocese are encouraged to do, and, at 25, he was already a bit older than many of the missionaries.
He’d also never worked much with children before, he said, and it is the children that have surprised him the most, from the way they want to be there and already know a lot about Jesus to the way they become attached to their teachers.
“It’s like they’ve claimed me,” Beeber said, of the fifth and sixth graders he teaches in the day program. “They chanted my name. I didn’t tell them to do that.”
“I love this lifestyle,” McGovern said, “sharing the childlike joy of Jesus. It’s very clear what Jesus is doing with us this summer.”
This year, the catechetical program focused on the sacraments and on the joyful mysteries of the rosary.
“There’s a natural response to Jesus,” Beckett said. “And this piques their interest.”
McGovern and Widhalm said that they’ve become close, sometimes staying up too late talking to one another. Both had relatives who were Totus Tuus missionaries before, and knew what to expect from living in community, participating in Mass and holy hours, praying the rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours.
“It just felt like Jesus wanted me to give him my summer,” Widhalm said.
Monahan said he is grateful for the parishes that host the program, finding volunteers and host families and everything else they need to do, and he’s grateful that Totus Tuus landed in the vocations office.
The vocations office has been a stable base with more funding from generous endowments than some other archdiocesan offices, he said, and that’s important for a program that doesn’t always show immediate benefits. Some dioceses have had Totus Tuus and dropped it, he said.
“It’s an easy program to cut,” Monahan said. “It requires a lot of time and attention, you’re not going to make money on it and you’re working with immature college students.”
But as Pope Francis wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium,” all good fruits take time to develop, he said.