On the first Saturday that felt like spring in New York, hundreds of people returned to St. Nicholas of Tolentine in the University Heights section of the Bronx for the third and final day of the New York Regional Encounter.

The morning began with song and praise, prior to the beginning of the formal program. Father Carlos Germosen, parochial vicar of St. Peter-St. Mary Church in Haverstraw, who was ordained in 2023, testified about how working with Encounter Ministries has changed both his life and his approach to the priesthood.

“God has fundamentally blessed me with this change, this transformation to be attentive to the voice of the Father, to be a preacher of truth with boldness, with fire, to preach with power, to give glory to God in my service as a priest, in my service as a friend, and as a brother. So, I just thank God. I just thank God above all things for everything that he has done for me and for everyone who’s participating in the Encounter school,” Father Germosen said.

Encounter Ministries “exists to unleash the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in the world through teaching, equipping, and activating disciples to demonstrate the love of God through the power of the Holy Spirit in their sphere of influence,” according to its website. The Brighton, Michigan-based organization maintains an Encounter School satellite campus in the Bronx.

Archdiocese of New York Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Espaillat, who spoke at the event Friday evening, then introduced Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the morning’s keynote speaker.

“It is my job not just to introduce him as not only our shepherd but one of my mentors and one of my spiritual fathers. And you are in for a treat today because he is going to walk us through the new evangelization and the role of the Holy Spirit. As I mentioned to you yesterday, there is a lot that we have forgotten, and he’s a great teacher,” Bishop Espaillat said.

Church history and the New Evangelization

Cardinal Dolan addressed the concept of the new evangelism in the context of Church history. In just under an hour, Cardinal Dolan outlined eight eras of the Church’s history and the role that evangelization played in each, from the Apostolic Age, beginning with Pentecost and lasting until approximately A.D. 105, characterized by the original apostles spreading faith despite limited resources, and to the New Evangelization of our current era, which emphasizes personal conversion, the universal call to evangelize, independence from cultural support, quality over quantity, and hope in Christ’s continued presence.

That emphasis on quality over quantity was a theme that Cardinal Dolan reinforced. “We have a God who counts us and we have a God who can count numbering the hairs on our head. We have a God not interested in numbers or quantity but in quality. We have a God who likes the invisible more than the visible… Now, does all this challenge and concern us? You bet it does. Does it depress us? Never, never—because we have a God who doesn’t keep score, take a census, or count. And that’s part of the new evangelization,” he said.

Cardinal Dolan also indicated that while a Christian culture is an advantage to evangelization, a secularization of the culture is an insurmountable obstacle.

“The first Christians hardly came from a Catholic culture but from a Jewish one, and they did pretty well, right? So, we often—I do, I grew up, I was born in the 1950s—in the ’50s, we’re kind of the last fumes of a kind of an intact Catholic culture in the United States… We had our Catholic clubs, we had our Catholic organizations, we had everything Catholic—an intact Catholic culture. Bye-bye. We might mourn it. We might still be extraordinarily grateful for some of it that is still with us, but there ain’t no use crying over it, all right?”

Finding hope in Jesus

Cardinal Dolan referred to his own recent confession in addressing the current era and its need for the new evangelization.

“I’ll tell you something personal. A couple of weeks ago, it was Wednesday, when I went to confession. I said to my confessor, ‘Father, I have sinned against faith and hope because I worry. I worry so much about the church. And I sometimes wonder where Jesus is.’ And the confessor wisely said, ‘You just made an act of hope because you have expressed the belief that Jesus is in charge. “I am with you all days, even to the end of the world, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” — even though they never stop trying,'” he said. Cardinal Dolan concluded his talk, saying, “There is nothing new in the new evangelization because Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

After lunch, the event continued, with breakout sessions led by Sarah Kaczmarek, director of pastoral ministry at Encounter Ministries and the director of the Encounter School of Ministry, and Gilbert Rodriguez, coordinator of adult discipleship and marriage formation for the Archdiocese of New York and online school facilitator for Encounter Ministries.

Bishop Espaillat celebrated the evening vigil Mass. After a break for dinner, Father Mathias Thelen, founder of Encounter Ministries, presented the event’s final impartation.