By Gina Christian
(OSV News) – Thousands of youth and young adults across the nation were assured of God’s love – and encouraged to respond to his call in their lives – during an annual gathering spanning three cities, with Pope Leo XIV delivering a special recorded message to participants.

“Be open to what the Lord has in store for you,” the pope said in a video address to those attending the SEEK 2026 conference.

This year’s conference took place Jan. 1-5 at three event locations – Columbus, Ohio; Denver; and Fort Worth, Texas – drawing an estimated 26,000 participants in total for talks and workshops on encountering Jesus Christ. The schedule included daily Mass, Eucharistic adoration, the sacrament of reconciliation and fellowship.

Among the numerous conference speakers were Father Mike Schmitz, Matt Fradd, Chris Stefanick, Sister of Life Mary Grace and Sister Josephine Garrett, a sister of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

In his Jan. 4 keynote address, Curtis Martin – founder of conference sponsor FOCUS, an international Catholic missionary outreach which serves at more than 200 college campuses in the U.S., Mexico and Europe, as well as at some 20 parishes – told attendees that God “wants to dance with” them.

Martin stressed the transformative power of God’s love, which enables those infused with it to in turn become missionary disciples, able to “go love the world.”

SEEK 2026 centered on the theme “To the Heights,” a favorite exhortation of the recently canonized St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, an avid mountaineer and patron of young adults.

Bishop Earl K. Fernandes of Columbus reflected in his homily at the SEEK 2026 opening Mass in that city Jan. 1 that the conference’s timing and its 2026 theme harmonized well.

“The mighty God descended from the starry heaven and became a child so that we might go up to heaven, ‘toward the heights,’ as Pier Giorgio Frassati might say,” Bishop Fernandes said.

In his pre-recorded video message to the SEEK attendees, which was posted along with a transcript to the Vatican website, Pope Leo also appeared to echo St. Frassati’s sentiment, urging SEEK attendees to reflect on the call of the first two disciples of Jesus as detailed in John 1:35-51.

The pope said that St. Andrew and the other disciple – initially followers of St. John the Baptist – pursued Jesus, whose first recorded words in John’s Gospel were a question posed to the two: “What do you seek?”

Jesus “directs this same question to each one of you,” said the pope, adding, “The answer is found in a person. The Lord Jesus alone brings us true peace and joy, and fulfills every one of our deepest desires.”
The pope’s message deeply resonated with Jetzemany Rincon, 22, who was among the 16,000 SEEK participants in Columbus.

“When I saw the pope come on, I started crying because I realized that he has such a big Church … and he was able to center down,” Rincon, a member of the Columbus Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Star of the New Evangelization parish, told The Catholic Times, the newspaper for the Columbus Diocese.

Discerning one’s God-given vocation was a core element of SEEK 2026, with Sister Catherine Rotterman of the Felician Sisters of North America, who was on hand at the Fort Worth gathering, saying the conference enables young adults to see themselves as part of a “much bigger Church.”

“SEEK helps them dream of where God might be leading them,” Sister Catherine told North Texas Catholic, the newspaper serving the Diocese of Fort Worth.

At the Denver gathering, archdiocesan vocations director Father Jason Wallace described SEEK as an opportunity for young people to “set themselves aside and put God first” to discover what he has created them for.

“God created some people to be married, he called some people to be priests; so it’s not so much what I want to do, it’s what God created me to do,” Father Wallace told Denver Catholic, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Denver. “That was in his mind from all eternity, what he created me for.”

Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila of Denver, who celebrated the conference’s Jan. 1 opening Mass in that city, highlighted Mary as the model for developing a profound relationship with Christ, and discerning his will for one’s life.

“If we ponder that within our hearts and open our hearts to that truth of who we have become in Baptism, we will only grow in a deeper encounter and deeper intimacy with Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit, putting our confidence in them,” said Archbishop Aquila. “And pondering in our own hearts what it means to be a disciple, what it means to be a beloved son, a beloved daughter of the Father, to receive our true identity. Not an identity founded in the world, but an identity that is given, bestowed upon us by a God who loves us and wants us to be with him forever.”

Four-time SEEK attendee Angelina Roa, who teaches at St. Rita Catholic School in Fort Worth, described the conference as an ideal way to begin 2026, deepening both faith and fellowship.

“Going to SEEK starts off the year with Jesus,” she told North Texas Catholic. “It’s inspirational to be in the room with so many Catholics.”

(Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Contributing to this report were Hannah Heil of The Catholic Times/Diocese of Columbus; André Escaleira, Jr., and Jacqueline Gilvard Landry of Denver Catholic/Archdiocese of Denver; and Susan Moses of North Texas Catholic/Diocese of Fort Worth.)