Students eagerly await the beloved November Retreat Week every year, anticipating the chance to step back from the craziness of our world and spend a few days with God. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has forced Campus Ministry to adapt its programming. 

The Thanksgiving retreat week gives the entire student body the week off in order to allow many students the opportunity to embark on a SLUH retreat without worrying about missing school. During this retreat week, SLUH typically hosts six retreats for its students: Freshman Retreat, two junior retreats, a Kairos retreat, a service retreat, and the Philia retreat. However, Campus Ministry has had to change the format and assess the safety of every retreat. 

The largest retreat that Campus Ministry hosts during the week is the annual Freshman Retreat, which gathers the whole freshman class together at school for a day of faith formation, bonding, and growing in unity as a class. It is seen by many as the culmination of freshman orientation, combining and reminding the students of all they learned through Direction Days, Running of the Bills, and other events.

Campus Ministry wanted to preserve having the whole freshman class participate in the retreat together, so they had to adapt or change many of the activities that students engage in. One of the biggest changes is that students will be spending more time in small groups and having small group discussions.

“The elements of the retreat itself we are trying to keep consistent,” said Deves. “Again how we deliver that will change slightly.” 

 In years past, the whole class would join together to listen to talks from faculty members. However, due to social distancing guidelines, this option was not feasible. 

“The biggest change is about spacing,” said Deves. “Just being able to split people into groups so that we don’t have the whole class and the many senior advisors in one space. In a normal year we would have multiple different opportunities for them to be together, but that's just one of the things we need to work around.” 

Back in August, Fr. Joseph Hill, S.J. organized the first junior retreat, successfully providing students with a powerful and safe retreat experience and showing that retreats could continue throughout the school year. Two more junior retreats will take place next week, and Hill hopes to preserve most of the major aspects of the retreat, but in a shorter time period. 

“Normally the junior retreat is two nights but we rearranged the schedule so it is now two full days and one night. Usually it is a half day, a night, full day, night then half a day. So we were able to do all  the same things just tightened up,” said Hill. “We tightened it up because we felt that this would be safer.” 

Another retreat that had to be tightened due to safety was the Kairos retreat. Now instead of being a four-day, three-night retreat, it was shortened to three days and two nights in order to create a safer environment. 

Another major hurdle that Campus Ministry had to face was where to find leaders for Kairos. The two previous Kairos retreats, scheduled for April and June, were cancelled due to the pandemic, so there are no current seniors who have been on the retreat and therefore no seniors that are able to lead the Kairos retreat. 

“None of the seniors have been on Kairos, so we didn't have any student leaders,” said Hill. “So we came up with a plan where we are bringing in some alumni to give the talks and lead part of it and then you have the adult chaperones.”

Despite being able to host four out of six of the retreats, Campus Ministry had to make the tough decision to cancel the Service Immersion retreat and move the Philia retreat over safety concerns. One of the fundamental aspects of the Service Immersion retreat is that the  participants simulate living in a low income situation. This requires them to live in close proximity to one another and frequent interactions with the most vulnerable in the St. Louis community. 

“On the Service Immersion retreat, students live in a very tight apartment, and they try and simulate what it means to live in a low income environment, and that clearly wasn’t going to work in the COVID era,” said Hill. “Then they are interacting with vulnerable populations. We couldn’t see a way that we could safely do that retreat and not change what the retreat is.” 

The Philia retreat, put on in conjunction with ACES, is being moved to the spring, which ACES felt would be safer and better. 

“We believe strongly that retreats are powerful, spiritual and personal moments of formation for our students,” said Deves. “We believe so strongly in these that we make it a centered part of the year, we give a whole week to retreats and that doesn’t change regardless of if we are in a pandemic or not.”