By Katie Vasquez
It’s a big day for scouts at the Ten Mile River Scout Camp in the Catskills.
While normally they are preparing to strengthen their camping skills, today they got a lesson in faith from Brooklyn Bishop Robert Brennan.
“It’s a beautiful spot, but it’s great to see the enthusiasm of the young people from all around the tri-state area and beyond, actually, who love the outdoors, love the skills they’re learning, practical skills, really in harmony with nature,” Bishop Brennan said. “Then they encounter the Lord in that.”
Bishop Brennan’s trip to the camp is an annual tradition.
For the last three years, he has hiked to the camp, leading the young men and women in prayer in the mess hall, and at the nature chapel, where he celebrates Mass.
For the scouts hailing from the Diocese of Brooklyn, the prayers make being hundreds of miles away from home feel a little less daunting.
“I do like that because I go to Mass usually every Sunday,” said Aryan Adams, a scout from Troop 173. “So this makes me feel more at home.”
“I like expressing how it is and loving Jesus and all of that stuff,” said Lucas Senatore, a scout from Troop 99.
Bishop Brennan also just finished his own journey, hundreds of miles from home.
He recently attended the 10th National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis and is excited to share with the scouts the event’s main message about Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist.
“I was making that connection between the wonderful world of nature that we have here with the scouts and then the power and the majesty and the glory of God,” Bishop Brennan said. “He calls us into friendship and gives us his very body and blood in the Eucharist. So it all comes together. The experience of the Congress, their experience here, it all comes together in friendship with the Lord.”
Bishop Brennan hopes these scouts will also be inspired to evangelize.
Jon Paolo Marasigan, youth minister at Mary Gate of Heaven Church in Ozone Park, and a member of Troop 173, said he can already see a difference among his fellow scouts.
“We do have guys in our troop that are not Catholic and just kind of exposing them to the Catholic Mass, just giving them just even if they have questions as to what’s going on,” Marasigan said. “Answering those questions is enough to kind of give them the understanding that this is who we are, this is who we believe in as Catholics. I feel like scouting as a youth ministry is definitely a way of evangelization.”
Bishop Brennan said he hopes the Catholic scouts at the camp will be the faces of the Church, spreading witness to Jesus Christ, maybe even helping the scouts who have no faith find God in the wilderness.