Diocese of Evansville
Youth minister seeks to be ‘real,’ ‘honest’ and ‘transparent’
By Mary Ann Hughes (Message staff writer)
Joe Hardesty’s favorite poem is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. In it, the poet writes of “two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and how he is “sorry I could not travel both.”
At the end of the poem, he writes, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Joe heads the youth ministry program at St. John the Baptist Church in Newburgh. He says the poem reminds him of all of the choices — both good and bad — that he has made during his 29 years.
He was raised in Newburgh, the youngest of 11 children. He was a bit of a challenge as a teenager, he said, remembering a time when he wanted to get an ear pierced. His mom said no, but he did it anyway. When he wanted a second piercing, she said no. He did it anyway.
Then, he decided he wanted to dye his hair blonde. She said no. He headed to a nearby drugstore to purchase hair dye. A friend told him that because his natural hair color was so dark he should leave the dye on for about 45 minutes.
He did, and when he rinsed his hair, “I was a carrot top. I had bright orange hair.”
His mom took one look at him and said, “Joe, Joe, Joe. You are going to TEC.”
TEC, Teens Encounter Christ, is a Catholic retreat program for teens. He went to a weekend, but wasn’t open to it. In fact, he told one of the youth leaders that he wanted to go home.
She agreed, but made a deal with him. “She said, ‘If you put 100 percent into today, I will drive you home tomorrow.’”
He did, and the weekend experience became “wonderful.”
“They accepted me for who I was, not for who people had labeled me to be.”
In 1999, he headed up to St. John Vianney in St. Paul, Minn., to give the seminary a try. After spending a year there, he decided that the priesthood was not for him.
“It was the most growing year of my life,” he said. “I learned how to be a good friend, a good father and a good husband.”
He moved to Louisville, and started working in sales. “I did really well financially, and I was working my way up in the company.” But inside, he was questioning the road he was traveling. “I said, ‘Who cares? What point is that making in life?’”
One weekend, while he was visiting his family in Newburgh, Father Joseph Ziliak, pastor at St. John’s, asked if he was interested in doing youth ministry.
Joe’s immediate reaction was “No. I’m making really good money.”
But he began to feel a tug back to his home parish. He talked to his girlfriend, Lisa, asking her, “Is this right?” They both prayed about it, and he decided to submit his resumé to the parish.
When he was interviewed for the job, he was asked why he would consider leaving a job with such a lucrative future. He answered, “I heard [this job] has a really good retirement package.”
He was hired. He and Lisa got married, and now they have a 10-month-old son named Elijah with another baby expected this June.
In his work with youth, he says it’s important to “be real, to be honest and to be transparent. Bishop Gettelfinger told me that when I was a seminarian — to be transparent. If you are sad, be sad. If you are happy, be happy.”
Joe also keeps in mind the words often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.”
That’s what he tries to do when he accompanies the young adults on mission trips to Appalachia, when he joins them for games at the parish youth house, and when he is with them on the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
He has just returned from this year’s march. Last year while he was there, he noticed a man sitting in an electric wheelchair. The man was severely handicapped, and Joe noticed him because he was moving so much in his wheelchair. At first, Joe thought he was “having a fit,” but then he realized that the man was determined to leave his wheelchair and walk in the march.
“It would have been so easy for his mother to abort him,” Joe said. Instead, she had given birth to him and he had become “an activist for life.” Watching the man struggle to walk, Joe understood that “everyone deserves the opportunity for life and human flourishing.”
It’s not a message that teenagers hear very much. “Basically, in society with the TV, with MTV, with everything they see, there is the illusion of disposal. If you don’t like your wife, get rid of her. If you don’t like your TV, get rid of it. They look at being pregnant as a problem.”
As a youth minister, he teaches “an understanding of what happens with the birth control pill, with the morning after pill, with abortion. I tell them, ‘It’s your body, but it’s God’s temple.’”
He also takes the parish teens on mission trips to Appalachia. Sometimes, they’ve only seen Newburgh or a condo on a Florida beach. The poverty they see in the mountains “puts a shock into their systems. They see this is what God meant by ministering to the poor.”
So many teens today deal with issues of stress and the difficulties of relationships with their friends and family members, Joe said. They spend their days in school, and then from 3 to 5 p.m. they are busy with sports and other extra-curricular activities. Evenings are filled with homework. “You throw work into that juggle,” he said, and it’s easy to see where the stress comes from. Parents used to limit their teens’ activities, he said, but now the parents are “the taxi drivers.”
So how does a young adult fit a relationship with Christ into such a busy life?
Joe believes that can be the role of the parish youth program. It can become the place where young adults can talk about the Church and its views about abortion, homosexuality and pre-marital sex.
He has begun to hold overnights for the parish teens, offering a time for them to talk about loyalty, honesty and integrity. “The weekends are pretty intense, but we have fun.” The young men of the parish meet for one weekend, and the young women have their own weekend a few weeks later. At the girls’ weekend, which is coordinated by women counselors from Catholic Charities, “they talk about body image and modesty.”
Both weekends are based on Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” an integrated vision of the human person, body, soul and spirit.
(Go to the website of the Diocese of Evansville) †