Someone Who Remembers Your Name: What Pope Leo Asked of Campus Ministers
Rome, on the feast of St. John Paul II
This morning I sat in the Paul VI Audience Hall with 1,200 educators and pastoral ministers from 162 countries. We came to Rome for the Congress on School and University Pastoral Ministry. On the feast of St. John Paul II, a pope who never stopped believing in young people, Pope Leo XIV spoke to us about ours.
I have sat in a lot of conference halls. This one was different. The Holy Father did not hand us a strategy. He described, almost line by line, what a good campus minister does on an ordinary Tuesday.
“Someone who remembers your name”
Pope Leo began with the students themselves. He named their gifts first: enthusiasm, generosity, a spirit of service. Then he named what they carry. Wounded families. Digital loneliness. A sense of inadequacy. Fear of a future that seems uncertain.
“Many pass through the corridors of our schools and universities and perhaps feel anonymous,” he said. His answer was simple. Our campuses should be, first of all, “home,” a familiar place where one is expected.
Then came the line I will carry back to every campus minister I know:
“The first proclamation often comes through a style of welcome: someone who looks you in the eye, who remembers your name, who notices your absence, who rejoices at your return.”
That is evangelization. Not a program. A person who notices.
He went further. He named “a culture of performance that constantly compares and ranks, at times mercilessly,” and warned that “a misunderstood meritocracy ends up failing to respect persons. And so many end up giving up before they even try.” Anyone who has sat with a student after a failed midterm knows exactly what he means.
His remedy is trust. “Courage is born of a pact of trust: from the experience of someone who believes in you before you believe in yourself. Jesus did not choose the Twelve because they were courageous; he called them, and through his trust he made them capable.”
What this asks of us on the front lines
The speakers who followed filled in the picture. Three ideas stayed with me.
Desire comes before knowledge. Prof. Massimo Recalcati of Milan argued that education without encounter has no fire. Only someone who still longs to know can teach, and only joy makes us credible. He kept returning to Jesus' words to the young girl in Mark's Gospel: Talitha kum. Rise up. Our students need to hear that every day.
Formation is not a side program. Sr. Martha Séïde, FMA, warned against reducing students to skills and outcomes. They are not a performance, she said. They are people looking for truth, beauty, and meaning. She asked that campus ministry be less like a lecture chair and more like a table, where people think and search together. Pope Leo said the same of service: care for the poor and for creation “are not side activities, but places where the heart learns to expand.”
Slowness is a gift. Speaker after speaker named the noise our students live in. Fr. Mario Inzulza, SJ, asked whether young people are losing the ability to hear God at all. Pope Leo asked us to “accompany the slow germination of thought” and to protect students from the idea that thinking is useless. Silence, wonder, and patient accompaniment are not luxuries. They are the work.
A constellation, not a lone star
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça opened the Congress with an image I cannot shake. Each of us is a single point of light, he said. Sometimes we are tired. But together we become a constellation, able to guide one another and others.
That is what CCMA is. More than 600 members on 375 campuses are not lone stars. We are a constellation, and our work is to help each light shine where God has placed it.
Br. Carlos Gómez Restrepo, FSC, gave us seven verbs for university ministry: welcome, listen, proclaim, discern, connect, serve, hope. Then he gathered them into one word. Accompany. It is the word at the center of our mission. Campus ministers accompanied, equipped, and sent, so they can do the same for every student who walks through their door.
Pope Leo ended with Emmaus, where the Risen One “draws near, walks with them, listens, explains, makes their hearts burn, and finally lets himself be recognized in the breaking of the bread.” False teachers promise quick answers, he told us. “You, instead, have chosen to do something greater: to walk with them along the road until they discover the gifts God has already placed within them.”
So here is my invitation to every campus minister reading this. This week, learn one more name. Notice one absence. Rejoice at one return. That is the first proclamation. The Holy Father just told the whole Church it matters.
Rosie Chinea Shawver, MDiv, is President & Executive Director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association. She writes from Rome, October 22, 2026.