At my eighth-grade graduation from St. Agnes School in Arlington, way back in 2010, a laminated placard with my picture hung from the cinder-block walls of our parish center, alongside those of my 40-something other classmates. Each told of our individual career dreams, if a 14-year-old can have such a thing.
Mine read, “Architect or Spy.” While I labor in neither of these fields, it seems, in some way, God saw the desires of my adolescent heart and has granted them, albeit in an unpredictable way.
I currently write content and develop curriculum for FOCUS — the Fellowship of Catholic University Students.
FOCUS delivers this content to our 900-plus college campus missionaries in the U.S., Europe, and Mexico and to the almost 30,000 university students we engage with on a weekly basis. While I am certainly not responsible for the structural integrity or design of any edifice, my team is responsible for the structural integrity, design, and coherence of the conveyance of truth in the training and equipping of those who serve in our apostolate.
No building blueprints to be found here, but rather the creative construction, outlining, and enunciation of messages (via Bible studies, articles, talks, lectures, etc.) that carry the greatest, most compelling truths: those that belong to Christ and his church, meant to reach all.
And while I do not steal intel from foreign entities for the government, I am, perhaps like covert operatives, deeply interested in people — who they are, where they’re from, where they’re going.
For four years as a campus missionary at Harvard and NYU, I lived wholly oriented toward people, toward the stories of those around me. I sought to know them deeply and to invite them into my life in return to develop a relationship of established trust. Then I could share my greatest treasure and invite them to take it for themselves, namely, my relationship and faith in Jesus Christ, my fidelity to his church, and the gifts and blessings won for me in his life, death, and resurrection, now offered to all by faith.
I was born and raised in Arlington, attended Catholic schools, and was raised in a warm, faith-filled household. However, to me, perhaps due to our proximity to Washington, the ultimate battle to be fought and won existed, ostensibly, between red and blue, donkeys and elephants, them and us. It wasn’t until college, through the experience of my own hardships and poverty, that the character and dimensions of the ultimate battle in my eyes expanded from political to existential, in a spiritual sense. I began to see that salvation was bound up in neither this nor that foreign policy, neither tax cuts nor stimulus plans, not in Supreme Court justices and not in the Constitution. Salvation is in Jesus Christ alone.
This conviction led me to forgo a “normal” post-grad job search and to a Catholic missionary organization, a place I never thought I’d end up. Who evangelizes? That’s not the business of the average Sunday-Mass-going Catholic, is it?
I learned, yes, in fact it is. And not only is each and every Christian called to share the Good News, doing so is, and has been for me, the most satisfying, exciting, surprising adventure you can embark on.
I watched young women at NYU (six to be exact) come to faith and receive the sacraments, in sheer delight of the gift they were receiving from the church. The Catholic faith — even amid the glitzy, seductive narratives sold to young people in New York City about where to find satisfaction and fulfillment — was the ultimate, final answer to their most vexing unanswered questions. I saw, and they now see, the ultimate battle is for souls. The victory has been won, but the question remains: What will be the margin of victory?
Hofer works in the formation department for FOCUS.
Corpus Christi