SPRINGFIELD, Ky. — The sixth annual Ignite Your Torch Catholic youth conference was launched July 22 at St. Catharine College with an energetic, entertaining and motivational address from a Dominican priest not so far removed from his own younger days.

Father James Cuddy is chaplain at Providence College in Rhode Island, where he graduated in 1998. He spent a little more than a year in Louisville as a deacon and then a newly-ordained Dominican priest at St. Louis Bertrand Church.

In his presentation, Father Cuddy noted that there were times in his youthful past when he “tiptoed around the house on Sunday morning, thinking that maybe if I didn’t wake my parents, I wouldn’t have to go to Mass.”

That was in his formative years in Braintree, Mass., before he went to Providence, before he spent a year in the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps and before he realized that God was calling him to the priesthood.

He told the crowd of nearly 300 in the St. Catharine gymnasium that he knew about the religious and metaphysical questions they more than likely have had in their own minds at least a time or two in the past. And he noted that those eternal questions of faith and purpose are universal — common to everyone from the crowd in the gym to those who sat on a hillside in front of Jesus and listened to the Sermon on the Mount.

“The people at the Sermon on the Mount were not unlike all of you,” he said. “They were all different people from different places who had different reasons for coming to hear Jesus. They were young and old, sick and well, and they were asking themselves the same questions that you are asking.

“ ‘Am I really supposed to believe this stuff?’ ‘How much of it should I believe?’ ” the priest said. “Every one of us has to answer these questions for ourselves.”

With God’s help, of course. Father Cuddy emphasized that despite the crowd’s differences, they all shared some things in common, too.

“For all of us, no matter who you are, no matter what made you come here today, there are really only two reasons for your being here,” he explained. “The first is this: You are here because Jesus wants you here. Period. Jesus wants you here, and he wants to do something amazing in your life this very weekend.”

The other reason the crowd had assembled at St. Catharine College for Ignite Your Torch, he suggested, is “because you all want to be happy.”

“As men and women, boys and girls, everything we do is for the sake of being happy,” he said. “You study because you think if you do well on this test, then maybe your parents will get off your back and you’ll be happy. You also refrain from doing things because those things can be harmful, can make you less happy.”

So the young people and their leaders — more than a dozen religious sisters, 10 to 15 priests, five Dominican Brothers, and 30 to 40 adult chaperones — gathered at the four-day conference because God wanted them there and because they wanted to grow in their happiness and grow in their faith, he said.

“All of this speaks to the desire for happiness that’s in each of our hearts,” Father Cuddy said. That happiness, he added, grows when we are reconciled with Jesus.

“Jesus himself is the one who came down to be with us, to restore us to happiness, to restore us to the Father,” he said. “Jesus brings us together for this weekend.”

Reaching real happiness, real joy, isn’t an easy thing to do, Father Cuddy said. He noted that the late Pope John Paul II said that the Beatitudes, preached by Jesus to those at the Sermon on the Mount, “give us map to happiness — but it is an uphill path.”

“Jesus walked this road before us so that his joy might be in us (and) might be our joy,” said Father Cuddy. “Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of the Beatitudes, and so he brings us here today, sitting in the bleachers not unlike those on that hillside more than 2000 years ago.”

He encouraged the young people to pray together, to take part in the sacraments, to visit the conference’s chapel of adoration and to attend confession.

“Come together as a community of young men and women who love the Lord and who want to love him more,” the priest said. “Pray together this weekend ... and watch what happens.”

This year’s conference was the second in a row to be held at St. Catharine, and the college president, William Huston, told the Ignite Your Torch group that he was delighted they were there. In fact, before speaking to the group, Huston said he was hoping to soon make final an agreement with the conference’s sponsors — the St. Martin de Porres Dominican Community in New Hope, Ky., and Catholics United for Life — to keep the conference at St. Catharine for at least the next five years.

And he had some additional good news for those attending.

“You are the kind of people, the kind of students, we want at our school,” he said. “And I will promise you this today: If you decided to undertake your college education with us here at St. Catharine College, for every year you’ve attended an Ignite Your Torch conference, you’ll receive a $1,000 scholarship up to a maximum of $3,000.”

For that, and for the welcoming atmosphere the conference has received the past two years, Huston received a loud and long ovation.

“He’s been tremendous to us,” said Theo Stearns, one of the conference’s founders and leaders. “He has made us feel so welcome.”

During the weekend, the young people had the opportunity to attend 31 different workshops offered by nearly three dozen presenters. Ignite Your Torch concluded on Sunday, July 25, with a general assembly featuring Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, vocation discussions and a “Crowning of Mary” ceremony in Lourdes Hall.