It's time for our youth to get busy writing!

One of the few disadvantages of homeschooling, is that our childrens' work is not given public acclaim. Unless, of course, their mom has a blog. My local diocesan paper, The Long Island Catholic is calling for essays on the daily life and faith experiences of high school, college students, and young adults. Here is the post.
I am excited about this, because when Catholic youth are given a voice, we can see that they take their faith quite seriously and the results are inspirational. Our bishop has had a number of youth rallies, (see my posts on Proud 2B Catholic and Youth 2000) focusing on the Eucharist, confession, vocations, fellowship, and solid Catholic teaching. At last week's rally at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Island, I reperesented 40 Days for Life . Mine and other pro-life programs received wide attention from the young people there. Particularly gratifying was their enthusiastic response to Fr. Roderick Ermantingers' video about the conversion of Eduardo Verastegui, which is a great story in itself, and his participation in the film Bella.
Faith and Family magazine also has a youth essay contest, whose instructions are here, it's for 6-8th graders, and the deadline is Oct 15. The theme is "Caught Being Good".
The March for Life will be posting the rules for the 2008 essay, poetry and artwork contest on their website here.
I hope that this will help motivate your young writers. Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, once head of Ignatius Press, and now at Ave Maria Univesity, once told a large crowd of families, gathered in support of bringing EWTN to Long Island that, "homeschooling will bring about the salvation of the Catholic Church in America". Since Gabbi was just a toddler at the time, I thought this was a bit overstated. The more I know of the fine young Cathoilc young men and women who are going off to college; their personal example of holiness, and their articulate defense of the Faith, the more I come to believe that Fr. Fessio was right.