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SBVOC - Quo Vadis


By Fr. Hau Vu


There is an old story from the early Church of Peter, fleeing Rome to escape Nero's persecution, meeting a stranger walking the other way down the Appian Road. It is Christ. Startled, Peter asks him the question that would name a road, a legend, and now a retreat: Quo vadis, Domine? Lord, where are you going? Christ answers that he is going to Rome, to be crucified again. Ashamed, Peter turns around and walks back into the very city he was running from, and eventually into his own martyrdom.


It is a question that never stops being asked. And on the morning of July 12, standing in front of a small statue of Our Lady of Lavang, it was the question I found myself asking too.



We had eighty-one high school boys arriving that day for "Quo Vadis," our High School Discernment Retreat. And that same morning, word came in about the Summit Fire, burning near St. Andrew's Abbey in Valyermo, the very ground the retreat was to stand on.

My first thought was not poetic. It was panic dressed as a question: God, what do we do? Do I cancel? These boys had been waiting for this. Some of them had been waiting all year. Cancel it, and what happens to the young man who finally worked up the courage to come? Don't cancel it, and what happens if I've put eighty-one boys in harm's way?


I did not have an answer. So I did the only thing that made sense, I turned to the altar, to the statue of Our Lady of Lavang, and I prayed the kind of prayer you only pray when you've run out of your own plans: Mother Mary, if you want this retreat to happen, you will make it happen.



Then I picked up the phone and called Fr. Nhien, rector of the Divine Word Retreat Center. And Mother Mary, it turns out, was already ahead of me. "Bring your retreat here," he said. Three days, hosted, no hesitation.


I remember praying one more time after that, not for the venue anymore, but for the boys themselves. Lord, I don't know how many young men will still want to come after a last-minute change like this. Send them according to your will.


Eighty-one young men came.


The retreat itself was, in a word, amazing. These were boys who came for one of two reasons, and often both: to discover a vocation, or to encounter God and find healing they didn't yet have words for.


We began each day the same way we begin every act of formation, in prayer. And for the first day, many of them were still adjusting. Silent. Watching. Unsure of what to do with a room that wasn't asking anything of them except presence. But then the sacraments began, and something shifted. Boys who arrived guarded left the chapel changed. Not all at once, not dramatically for most, but unmistakably.


One young man in particular came up to me during the retreat. He told me that last year's Quo Vadis had saved his life. He had come with a history, drugs, violence, skipped school, a future he had already written off. This year, he came back. Not because he had to. Because he wanted to say thank you.



His story is not rare among our youth. It is, if anything, the story underneath most of their stories. They are searching for something they can't quite name, a love that hides behind every sin and every temptation they fall into. The love of Christ, masquerading as the lust and the noise of this world. A love only God can satisfy, and only in a place where no one is keeping score, where a boy doesn't have to impress anyone, only show up and see what God has for him.



Healing, for these boys, doesn't happen in isolation, it happens on common ground. Silence, prayer, talks, and good fraternal competition all did their part. This year we added something new: a mini World Cup, boys divided into teams of their own making, competing for the win. There is a particular kind of energy that competitive sport draws out of a teenage boy, an energy this world, with its screens and its comfort, has quietly drained out of a generation. For a few hours on a field in Riverside, it came roaring back.


But what bound them together wasn't the games. It was communion, quite literally, in Adoration, and in a healing experience where Fr. Arinze led them through naming their own wounds and letting God near enough to touch them. It was Fr. Ian, showing them what priesthood looks like when it isn't the caricature the world hands them. And it was Fr. Tomas Guillen, closing the retreat with an unfiltered account of his own vocation story, a reminder that authenticity before God is itself a journey of faith, that answering God's call is never easy, and that God never sends anyone into that difficulty unequipped.


This year's Quo Vadis pulled boys in from every corner of the vicariate, different parishes, different schools, different starting points. They left belonging to the same thing: Christ, who does not divide but gathers everyone into a single act of communion.


What God has planned for next year's Quo Vadis, none of us know yet. But I know this much: God is the one who made this retreat happen in the first place. A wildfire tried to take the ground out from under it, and instead watched eighty-one young men show up anyway.



If you want to see more photos of the Retreat click on this link below:



 
 
 

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