By Patrick Butler
Contributor

Sometime this spring—exactly when depends on how soon her successor can be broken in—Irene Friend will be officially retiring as director of youth ministry after 30 years with the Chicago Archdiocese.

But don’t expect her to cut back on her legendary 12-to-14-hour days anytime soon, said Friend. First she wants to be available as needed to help her successor

Friend is a Beverly neighborhood resident who, despite a recent hospitalization, will help out at Christ the King Parish and probably launch yet another career as a freelance consultant to Catholic dioceses around the country interested in seriously beefing up their youth outreach programs.

After all, youth ministry has evolved big time from the 1930s beginnings of movements like the Catholic Youth Organization, said Friend.

While sports are still important, the scope of youth outreach has been broadening since the 1970s, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops came out with its first “Vision of Youth Ministry” document, followed by a 1997 “Renewing the Vision” update. The update urged new emphasis on everything from community service to youth rallies like the one Feb. 15 at Maria High School featuring the Apex Ministries’ “Christian Vaudeville” act.

Friend has also been helping to put together the Oct. 30 Youth Day, kicking off a three-day Festival of Faith at Navy Pier, as well as the Nov. 13-16 National Catholic Youth Conference in Houston.

“You won’t believe how excited these kids get about being Catholic”—and about being from Chicago, Friend said.

She recalled how the Chicagoans who went to the Kansas City Catholic youth conference a few years back wore cow-themed spotted black-and-white clothes, which they promptly swapped with kids from other parts of the country for keepsakes like Texas cowboy hats.

There are also youth retreats, work with the Scouts and St. Peter Claver Society and alcohol and drug prevention programs for elementary and high schools, Friend said.

There’s also Teen Service Week, in which members of parish youth groups spend part of their summers helping out at places like the St. Vincent de Paul Day Care facility, said Friend, who oversees one coordinator in each of the archdiocese’s six regions or vicariates.

Those coordinators in turn work with 41 full-time and 81 part-time youth ministers. With 374 parishes in the archdiocese, “we still have a way to go” before every parish has at least one, she added.

To provide those workers, Friend helps with the 12- credit-hour Youth Minister Certification Program, which runs eight weekends over two years at Loyola University.

“And people wonder why I’m so hard to reach most of the time,” laughed Friend, whose once-larger staff was downsized during a budget crunch in the early 1990s.

As far as she’s concerned, all that means is she has to rearrange her resources to meet the needs of the moment.

“I’ve never been big on saying no,” said the South Bend, Ind.-born widow and mother of three, who came here by way of Wyoming, California and Iowa, where she worked for both the local heart and tuberculosis associations—at the same time.

She had planned on staying in Chicago only as long as it took her husband, a high school coach and teacher, to get his doctoral degree. By the tine he finished, however, her volunteer CCD teaching had led to a full-time job as archdiocesan coordinator of education and faith formation, which in turn led to assignments in what she hopes is a still-evolving youth ministry office.

As far as she’s concerned, a strong youth ministry program is the best insurance of a strong church 20 or 30 years from now.

“It used to be that if people left the church in their late teens, they usually returned when they got married or when their first child was born. That’s no longer quite as true today,” said Friend, adding that some drift off to other denominations, while others just drift.

“You’ve got to reach people while they’re still young,” she said. “There’s no other way around it.”