Catholic Gap Year - a new website in the U.K.

This week, the Catholic Church is launching a new website to encourage young Catholics to consider spending their gap-year in a Church-run project. It is the first time that a U.K. religious denomination has collated and published its gap-year opportunities on a single ‘umbrella’ site, seeking to market ‘faith’ as a key factor that young people should consider when choosing a gap-year.

The catholicgapyear.com website, a joint initiative between the Catholic Church’s National Office for Vocation and Catholic Youth Services, aims to provide young Catholics with information about how and where they can spend a gap-year in a faith environment. Its main target-audience is sixth-form and university students. 300 Catholic schools with a sixth-form and each university chaplaincy will receive posters advertising the site.

Given that more and more young people are choosing to take a gap-year before going to university or into work, the Church is keen to encourage young Catholics to spend time volunteering in projects which will help develop their faith and provide them with opportunities for vocational discernment, as well as developing the skills that other forms of gap-year ordinarily provide.

Father Paul Embery, from the Church’s National Office for Vocation said: “We have recognised that many of those who volunteer to work in faith-based environments have their faith nourished whilst they are there and also go on to serve the Church and wider community later in life in many different ways – sometimes even in the priesthood or religious life”.
Projects that young Catholics can apply to join include: residential youth work, sharing a home with physically disabled people and even some projects abroad in less-developed parts of the world.

In fact, many of the organisations listed on the website have offered gap-year opportunities for many years; this is the first time however that they have all been brought together and listed this way on-line. Each year, for example, Catholic youth centres and other peer-ministry projects based in the U.K., need to recruit 100 volunteers to adequately fulfil their projects’ aims and demand from users.

Although the majority of the projects listed on the site are run by Catholic agencies and would be best suited to young Catholics, some are also suitable for those who belong to other denominations and religions.

The Church is also keen to point out that it recognises the value of other forms of gap-year: “We are not saying that young Catholics should only spend their gap-year with the organisations listed on our site; rather we are simply drawing their attention to the opportunities that the Church offers. If they think that a different kind of gap-year will suit their needs better, that’s fine.” said Father Embery. “However we do encourage young adults to think what they can put into society, not just what they can get out of it. All of the projects we list will be challenging and character-building.”