Bishop Erik Pohlmeier spent time interacting with the next generation of Catholics when he attended a family night event at Frassati Catholic Student Center near the University of North Florida campus.
“It’s definitely a big blessing when the bishop comes to spend time with us,” UNF sophomore Luke Weber said.
Family night is something Catholic Campus Ministry hosts at the center weekly and it includes Mass followed by dinner and faith building conversations.
However, this night had a different feel to it as the bishop was invited and took part in a Q&A format that included questions of a range of topics from the more serious, such as the church’s stance on using birth control and exorcisms performed in the Diocese of St. Augustine to the lighter side and his favorite saints.
“It got me thinking of the ‘Good Shepherd,’ and how he knows his flock,” said Meghan Rubnick, a senior at UNF. “The bishop is such a beautiful resemblance of that, and he is such a good shepherd. Family night always feels like community, but it feels even more like home when the bishop is here.”
Weber and Rubnick served as MC for the night and relayed the questions to the bishop.
According to UNF senior Peter Ascheman, hearing the bishop firsthand made him think about certain topics in a whole new light and they are not things he has doubt about, but he had just not thought of it with that perspective before.
“It was really cool seeing his take on eternity, and how it is more like a state of being instead of just an infinity number of years,” Ascheman said.
The questions surrounding eternity and what it will be like are something that humans have pondered throughout the ages and it is something that continues to be on the mind of college students today.
“We’re talking about mysteries beyond our capacity to fully grasp them, so whatever we say about it isn’t going to be the perfect description of it,” Bishop Pohlmeier said. “We tend to think about it in terms of what’s going to last forever, but when we say, ‘lasts forever,’ what we picture is one day after another that doesn’t end, but that’s not the way it is in heaven, because God is outside of time entirely. In heaven there is time, but we don’t know how it works exactly.”
The bishop ended the night by giving the students some words of wisdom to go forth with in their lives, but it is also something he believes that every person can strive to do.
“Too often we don’t believe that spiritual things are real,” Bishop Pohlmeier said. “The fundamental necessity in our lives if we’re going to grow in our faith, is prayer. But part of growing in our maturity as Christians is that we learn to pray as a relationship with God, and part of any relationship is a conversation. The fundamental practice that’s missing from too many Catholics is that they lack a listening prayer. My suggestion would be to take five minutes and read the Gospel passage of the day and ask, ‘Lord what do you want to say to me?’”
Photos by Fran Ruchalski
