Cornerstone marks Catholic Students Week

By Marya Wickenhauser

SASKATOON — To mark Catholic Students’ Week, a monthly Cornerstone event for young adults was held on the University of Saskatchewan campus.

Cornerstone events in Saskatoon started as part of a Catholic Christian Outreach (CCO) Impact mission, and have continued as a joint effort of CCO and Face to Face Ministries.

The March 18 Cornerstone gathering was held in the “airplane room” in the Thorvaldson Building on campus, so named because of the many paper airplanes stuck in the ceiling — a tradition dating back to the war years.

Keynote speaker was Colm Leyne, co-ordinator of youth ministry for the Saskatoon diocese. He talked about the hard habits that keep a person from true happiness.

Jesus Christ is the key to our happiness, Leyne said, and knowing him with our minds is different from knowing him with our hearts. As human beings, we are created to be in a relationship with Christ, and through that lens, we are called to discern what is healthy and what is not.

Leyne said that the difference between happiness and pleasure is that happiness is God-centred and pleasure is materialistically centred. Everyone knows when they have missed the mark and found pleasure that isn’t true happiness; we can “feel it in the quiet of our hearts,” he said.

Leyne asserted that happiness has a name: Jesus. “Learn from good experiences and move on, experience what is life, don’t live in the past,” he added, encouraging participants to make new, more wonderful experiences by serving Jesus in day-to-day life.

“We aren’t supposed to be comfortable, we’re supposed to be saints,” he said.

Catholic Students’ Week was marked on university campuses across Canada March 14 - 21. It is an initiative of the Canadian Catholic Students Association (CCSA) and Canadian Catholic Campus Ministry (CCCM). Both prganizations are supported by the Canadian Catholic Conference of Bishops.