Catholic Youth Center’s drive for youth service

In 1961, the young, popular and Catholic President John F. Kennedy signed the Peace Corps into law. In 1962, the Catholic Youth Center in Minneapolis launched Peace Corps, junior grade, to capture the spirit of its namesake and empower high school students from across Minneapolis and the west metro to put their faith into practice for two weeks (or more) of their summer vacation under the supervision of young adults. High school freshmen were limited to in-town projects, but sophomore, junior and senior volunteers could choose to serve on a local music ministry team, support inner-city residents in Winnipeg, Canada, or San Felipe, Mexico, or work on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (among other sites). Like young people across the city and the country, Catholic students were inspired by the civil rights movement to do something to solve social problems.

Peace Corps junior grade members went to work. At Pine Ridge, for example, young people served on projects like digging ditches or sewing curtains in the morning and led a school for Native American children in the afternoon. The program was meaningful for participants, too. Maureen Arms, a junior at then-St. Margaret’s Academy, explained, “You don’t go into the program with a paternal attitude — ‘We’re going to do something for you’ — because we get more out of it than they do.” Students learned more about inequality, poverty and their own abilities as leaders and problem solvers. As Dennis Neal, one staff leader, explained, “Christianity doesn’t mean just piety; it means service.”

Evidently, naming programs after the Peace Corps was a popular tactic because the federal government

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