It’s an awakening on many levels.

There is a roomful of youth from parishes throughout the diocese, young people enjoying the experience of making new friends, energized by a shared faith.

With a mission to “Turn Down the Noise and Turn Up the Faith,” more than 500 youth from 36 parishes attended the Diocesan Youth Convention, held April 26 at Holy Family Parish in Citrus Heights.

Workshop topics included justice and spirituality, teen chastity, life after high school, and dealing with depression. Highlights of the event included a keynote presentation, liturgy and prayer, music and dance.

Adolfo Mercado, youth ministry coordinator for the diocese, said the convention brings teens back year after year and always recruits many newcomers.

“Youth from throughout the diocese see other Catholic young people active in their parishes,” he said. “It is an empowerment, helping them have a deeper understanding of their faith.”

Setting the tone for the day, Joe Poggi, principal of Mount St. Mary School in Grass Valley, delivered the keynote address. His message carried with it a suggestion that life-changing discoveries can be made by identifying the noise in life and tuning it out.

“God is a lot of time whispering to us,” he said. “The challenge is to identify the noise in life, think about how we react, and how to find God in the noise of our world today.”

It is his view that current pop culture, which glorifies doing what feels good and provides immediate gratification, threatens the physical and spiritual well-being of teens. But the good news, Poggi said, is that teen-agers also have an incredibly strong sense of fairness just waiting to be awakened.

“It’s a matter of finding out what teens care about and finding ways to get them to act out in an appropriate way,” he said.

Zac Rich, who attended the convention with a delegation from Divine Savior Parish in Orangevale, has found his own answer to getting rid of seemingly “trivial things” that take his focus away from his faith.

“I take a step back and look at what’s important for me,” he said. “God is there to catch me if it gets too heavy to turn off the noise.”

Dan Cardenas was one of 20 teens from St. Lawrence Parish in North Highlands attending the convention. Cardenas, a senior at Jesuit High School in Carmichael, served as a master of ceremonies and a musician at the event. He said dialogue at the convention addressed some of the same topics he had been discussing in the classroom at Jesuit.

“We’ve been talking about the noise of different messages coming from television,” said Cardenas, who recalled being bombarded with beer commercials. “Especially during high school years, drugs and alcohol are things you’re trying to avoid.”

He said his answer to drown out these issues is to get together with friends and relax making music, playing his guitar.

Poggi said another dimension of “noise” is the fact that Sept. 11 and the events that followed now identify this generation of young people.

Several of those attending the youth convention said they felt they had indeed been emotionally impacted and had priorities reshaped in the months after Sept. 11, 2001.

Natalie Dennis, one of about 20 young people attending the convention from St. Christopher Parish in Galt who served as master of ceremonies for the event, has a brother in the U.S. Air Force who has not yet been deployed to the Middle East but has been away from home.

“This is our country, but I don’t like the fact that people have been dying over there every day,” said Dennis, who counts her brother among her closest friends. “I’m spending more time with my family. My faith life has only grown.”

Kathryn Johnson, a sophomore at Loretto High School in Sacramento and a veteran of diocesan youth conventions, attended the event with a large delegation from the youth ministry at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Carmichael.

She said sharing the experience of events related to the war with Iraq with friends at school and in her church community has made her more sensitive to others, spending more time with people she loves.

“You don’t want to push any buttons of people who might be impacted in a personal way (by the war in Iraq). We’re being a supportive community and we pray about it,” Johnson said.

A new element in the youth convention this year was an invitation for seventh and eighth graders to attend morning and some afternoon activities. The young adolescent group completed service projects to benefit WIND Youth Center and Loaves and Fishes, both Sacramento-based social service organizations. The project involved filling backpacks with toiletry items and delivering them for distribution at the two organization sites.

“The younger kids always wanted to come, so we decided to invite them to participate and make them feel welcome,” Mercado said.

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