Conversion, invitation and ‘Eucharist FOMO’

The first time Issac Dessau and Jude Short asked their friend Seth Partney about the process of becoming Catholic, they were standing in front of a 7-Eleven drinking Slurpees after a game of pickleball.

The seeds of conversion had been planted long before. It started with Seth.

Seth describes himself as cradle Catholic who in high school was losing interest in the faith and “started doing wrong things and getting in with the wrong people.” But when a friend invited him to Encounter, an evening of praise and worship, eucharistic adoration and confession at St. Joseph Parish in Imperial, he decided to check it out.

“I went to confession for the first time in four or five years and just laid everything out. And the priest just told me, ‘welcome home,’” Seth said. “From there, it’s been the point of no return. I started going to youth group, trying to really learn about my faith instead of just halfway participating in it every Sunday.”

His friends at Hillsboro High School noticed.

“I kind of saw his transformation and how he leaped into the faith heavily, like, whoa — this is different,” Jude said. “(He’s) never really been a negative person, but just switching more to, immediately his first thought was on God and on Jesus with anything that happened.”

Jude, who was raised Baptist, accepted Seth’s invitations to a few youth group events and last summer attended Mass with him for the first time at Good Shepherd Parish in Hillsboro.

“I remember everybody going up to get Communion, to receive the Body, and I was like — whoa. I want to be part of this,” he said. “I thought about it, prayed on it, and I was like, this is the right thing to do. This is where I’m being called.”

Jude, 19, and Issac, 18, are now among five teenagers at Good Shepherd who are set to fully enter the Catholic Church at Easter. Across the archdiocese, 683 catechumens and candidates are preparing to receive sacraments of initiation — an increase of more than 30 percent over 2024.

The three freshmen at Jefferson College and two seniors at Hillsboro High School meet weekly for Christian initiation formation with Jessica Mayer, youth minister at Ignite Youth Ministry for Good Shepherd, Our Lady and Sacred Heart parishes. As a kind of in-between age group — too old for PSR but on the edge of adulthood — this small group formation gives Mayer the flexibility to meet them exactly at their level, she said.

“I always think of the ‘new methods’ and ‘new ardor’ that we’re supposed to be looking at” in evangelization, she said.

“I think it’s really clear how many people, especially young people, are just waiting for an invitation,” she added. “We just maybe don’t ask.”

For Seth, 18 and now a freshman at Jefferson College, extending those invitations came naturally. The word he uses is “chill”; he asked friends to come to things he was already planning to attend and answered questions as they came up.

“Someone told me, the only thing you can bring to heaven with you is the people around you,” Seth said. “So it was just like, well, these are my best friends. I’d be doing them a pretty big disservice to not, at least, show them how I want to live my life and what I believe is the one true way.”

Issac grew up attending a nondenominational church but was never baptized. Another mutual friend, Jillian Mayer, first invited him to an Ignite Youth Ministry event. Later, he tagged along to an Encounter night at St. Joseph.

“(Someone) came up to me and said, ‘you know, that’s Jesus up there sitting on the altar’” during adoration, he said. “And I just couldn’t believe it. And then I was studying more and more, just looking into it, and Seth took me to my first Mass. And then it started from there…now, adoration is one of my favorite things.”

Kayla Frantzen, 18, a senior at Hillsboro High School, was raised Lutheran but attended Good Shepherd School, laying a foundation of knowledge about the Catholic faith. Jillian invited her to a Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America conference, and Kayla then started attending Ignite Youth Ministry events.

“This last Steubenville was when I really made the full jump into saying I wanted to be Catholic,” she said. “There’s a lot in that retreat, but adoration was a big one.”

George Heine, 18, another senior at Hillsboro High School, became good friends with Seth, Issac, Jude and Jillian through the school band. He was raised Catholic but was never confirmed and had fallen away from practicing the faith.

When George was going through a tough time last year, Seth and Jillian invited him to youth group and then to the Steubenville conference.

“Adoration at Steubenville was huge…I’m not a very emotional person myself, but I was that night during adoration. I bawled my eyes out for an hour and half and just prayed every thought that was on my mind,” he said. “I knew I definitely 100% wanted to be confirmed after that.”

As he’s participated in Christian initiation formation this year, it’s like something finally clicked into place that he didn’t know was off-kilter.

“I didn’t know I was missing it that much. I always felt that little pull, but I didn’t know exactly what it was,” George said. “And then it finally hit me that I was like, ‘Oh, I really want to be confirmed.’”

The final member of the group, Isaac Truesdale, 19, moved to Hillsboro from Kansas City to play baseball for Jefferson College. He was raised in a nondenominational Christian church and had “a lot of misconceptions about the Catholic faith,” he said.

In high school, he started talking more with a Catholic friend about what the Church actually is and isn’t.

“He pointed some things out to me, specifically with the Eucharist in John 6 and the implementation of that, where as a very scripturally based person, I never noticed that, and that really concerned me,” he said. “So I started looking into that, and then came to the realization that the Catholic Church is accurate to Scripture and follows Scripture.”

When Isaac moved to Hillsboro, he looked up the nearest Catholic Church — Good Shepherd — and attended a couple Sunday Masses, where he heard that Christian initiation formation would be starting soon. He caught Father Mike Boehm after Mass and asked how he could join. Father Boehm connected him with Jessica and the other young adults, and he was folded into their faith-seeking community.

“It’s been great just being able to grow in my faith with other people, and not having to take this on alone,” he said.

With the Easter Vigil just a few short weeks away, the teenagers are excitedly anticipating their sacraments. They attend Mass together at Good Shepherd every Sunday, waiting for the day when they can participate in Communion with the rest of the congregation. (Or, as Kayla puts it: “I have very bad Eucharist FOMO at church.”)

Seth has been with his friends throughout their journey; he will serve as confirmation sponsor for Issac and Jude. Their entrance into the Church is just the beginning of what God is doing in their lives, Seth said.

“It’s all the Holy Spirit. It’s just having that openness in your heart to let it in and then work through you,” Seth said. “With all these guys here — the amount of young disciples they’re going to go and make! It’s all going to flourish from here.”