On Friday, September 20, an esteemed, celebrated, and very popular priest in the Catholic community visited Cathedral Catholic. Cathedral has had many speakers and visitors come to campus to share their stories over the years, but this guest definitely takes the cake. 

Father Mike Schmitz is from Duluth, Minnesota and is the director of Youth and Young Adult Ministries in the Diocese of Duluth as well as the Chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Newman centers are places of Catholic worship at public colleges or universities. Most know him as the ‘YouTube Priest’ or podcast host, as he is partnered with Ascension Press, a Catholic media company focused on spreading the word of God.

Father Mike has two podcasts, Bible in a Year and Catechism in a Year, as well as YouTube videos about almost any questions you have on your faith with a wide range of topics. Cathedral students were lucky enough to experience him celebrate Mass as well as give a speech afterwards, and I was lucky enough to ask him a few questions. 

Despite the priest’s enthusiasm and confident disposition, he didn’t always know if he was meant for the path he’s on now. When talking to Father Mike, he mentioned that he was “a missionary in Central America and didn’t know… I was getting ready to be engaged to a woman but it was really clear that God was like, ‘No, this is the next step I’m inviting you to take.’” He was called to the responsibility of preaching the faith and decided to take on that call, making a choice that altered the course of his life forever. 

Following his decision to become a priest, eventually came Fr. Mike’s well-known stardom from it. If you didn’t know already, it wasn’t Father Mike’s idea to start publishing his homilies online; it was actually his students who said that he should start posting.

Although originally appalled by the idea, he was finally swayed by the statement that, “you have these students you teach for 4 years and then after that, where do you go? Don’t you want to keep teaching them?”

Ascension Press then reached out and asked him to continue making content for them. The kick-off to his online presence was not originally Father Mike’s idea, but Bible in a Year as well as Catechism in a Year was. He wanted people to be “rooted and have a biblical worldview.” It’s a way where even though there’s so much chaos in this world, listening to bits of the Bible can relieve this chaos. 

Anonymous seniors’ takeaways from the visit were “that time is a gift and that we should focus on the now rather than the later” and “that God will always be with us in our journey of life.” Father Mike’s visit taught students a lot but it felt focused on seniors: even with the plights of senioritis and restless teenage minds, we can always find a way to be present in the moment and be grateful for what God has given us. 

His final words of advice for Cathedral students to take on their journeys was “to make the decision to take responsibility for their own spiritual life.”

As someone who has been going to Sunday Mass with my parents ever since I was little, going to Sunday school, and now Catholic school, I have only ever known being Catholic. Most Cathedral students are in the same boat, raised Catholic or Christian. We are now at a point in our lives where we are making the decisions: we can read the Bible of our own conviction, find time to pray, volunteer our own time to live out our spiritual lives instead of just accepting what we’ve been given.

Father Mike shared that “it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, but it has to have something that you own.” Your faith is yours to keep alive.