With the Steubenville Toronto youth conference seemingly burned out and faded away, the symposium that provides teens the chance to encounter Christ looks to be slowly finding new life after a four-year hiatus. 

While the conference is not physically returning to Toronto just yet, the next two years of Canadian Catholic presence at the event's annual Ohio conference June 28-30 are hoping to reignite the interest and passion of attendees with the hopes of bringing it back to Ontario’s capital in the near future.

The Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office of Catholic Youth (OCY) has facilitated upwards of 500 young Catholics from Toronto, Belleville and Peterborough to return to Ohio in 2024 and 2025. 

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“The goal for this year, as well as next, is to rebuild the momentum and drive while we attend in Ohio once again and reopen the opportunity to bring this special youth conference back home to Toronto,” said Fr. Joshua Roldan, outgoing director of the Office of Catholic Youth.

Taking its name from the Franciscan University in Ohio, the Steubenville conference has been putting on powerful, formative and spiritual events to re-engage teens with the Lord through Scripture, sacraments, lectures, music and liturgies.

Many years past saw youth ministries from across the Archdiocese making annual pilgrimages to Ohio to attend the conference. It was then that former director of the Office of Catholic Youth Fr. Frank Portelli, along with Cardinal Thomas Collins, sought to bring the conference north of the border to Toronto. 

“The Franciscan university had started expanding its conference throughout the United States and even in Eastern Canada with Steubenville Atlantic starting up in Halifax. Cardinal Collins had seen the growth combined with local parishes' desire to attend in Ohio and so after two years of planning, Steubenville came to Toronto in 2014 at the former Maple Leaf Gardens,” said Roldan.

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Following a run of five successful conferences in the Greater Toronto Area filling venues such as Roy Thomson Hall and Ontario Tech University in Oshawa with faith-driven young adults, the event ran into the roadblock that was COVID.

“It was primarily the pandemic that was responsible for the interruption,” Roldan said. “In 2020, we simply couldn’t run anything. Going into 2021, there was a real struggle to re-secure a venue with problems ranging from COVID policies still being in place as well as a general uncertainty and people being rightfully worried. It was a rough time for a lot of us.” 

The sheer size of a typical Steubenville conference up to that point did not favour a smooth restart in Toronto with organizers needing to account for 2,300 attendees at a single venue, a near-impossible task at the height of the pandemic. Like many other organizations, the OCY took to attempting different outdoor events such as summer camps to keep youth engaged while Steubenville Toronto fell to the back burner. 

“When we had looked to ramp the idea of a Toronto conference back up post-2021, the venues that used to host us with anywhere from 2,300 to 2,500 students present overnight with residence, there is just nowhere in the city that has been able to accommodate that,” Roldan said. 

Four years removed from the last event also left many Catholic youth unfamiliar with the event.

“We go to youth groups now talking about Steubenville in Toronto and the kids are like ‘What is that?’ They would have been in Grade 6 the last time it was here, they have never heard of it and have never been invited to one,” he said. 

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The three-day-long event comes on the cusp of Roldan leaving OCY to become pastor at St. John’s Parish in Toronto. With Fr. Paul Magyar set to succeed him at OCY at the end of June, Roldan outlined his hopes for the future of the Steubenville Youth Conference and what he wishes it would bring to young Catholics. 

“Ultimately what I would love to see is an opportunity where our young people can encounter Christ. With all the challenges that our young people are facing today, one of the beautiful things that this conference provides is witness, courage, care and love for them to be able to say ‘This is who we are’ and for them to not be afraid to go forth into the world living out that love,” he said.