Excerpt - The Thomas Aquinas College Interview??

You were once a college chaplain. Can you talk about what's entailed in ministering to college students?

Bishop Byrne: I was the chaplain at the ??University of Maryland from 1999 to 2007, a radically different experience than Thomas Aquinas College, a very secular university in a very secular state. The thing that I discovered was — in a ??culture where everything is possible and everything is permissible, and where tolerance is somehow seen as the only virtue — The Gospel stands out as something radical and new that many of the students hadn't experienced before.

So, I didn't have to re-create the product. We have the Way, the Truth, and the Life of ??Jesus Christ; it was about placing Him in the centre. I started to do Eucharistic Adoration and made our retreats centred on the Eucharist, Adoration, and Confession. Things started to change immediately. We tripled the number of students from a few hundred to nearly 1,000 in my time there. We had vocations, about 14 priestly vocations, about 5 vocations to religious life. It was a valuable lesson that if you want to change things, put ??Jesus in the centre, and it will all take care of itself.