By Rebecca Conte • Posted March 20, 2026

“What comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped,” Pope Francis said, and that is exactly what has been happening at Archbishop Wood High School this academic year. What started as a desire from a few students to have a space to discuss their Catholic faith has now turned into a full spiritual effort that is mostly student run.

FIAT, which stands for Faith In Action Today, is a new student-run club that began in Fall 2025. From the beginning, the main desire of the students in the club was to foster the Catholic faith both for themselves and for their peers, and allow time for eucharistic adoration and the sacraments outside the school day.

They began to have mini retreats after school with adoration, student witnesses and music. To make these opportunities more accessible to the student body at large the students began planning for FiatFest.

The club’s name is a nod to Mary’s Magnificat — her selfless, humble “yes.” The students mirrored this selflessness in answering “yes” to every prompting of the Holy Spirit. The main goal of FiatFest was to give others a way to explore how they too could magnify the Lord.

FIAT Club members welcomed over 100 students, mostly from the Archbishop Wood, to the energized school auditorium on Feb. 27 where dancing to praise music was encouraged.

Attendees came together because of their desires to know the Lord or simply out of curiosity. Having this many students come to worship voluntarily on a Friday night felt like nothing short of a miracle.

The evening began with an explanation of what was going to take place and how the event came to be. Then two underclasswomen gave prayerful witness expressing their experiences of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament through adoration. We were blessed to have Danny McCarthy with us who gave of his time, treasure and talent to lead praise and worship.

By 7 p.m., Capuchin Franciscan Father Michael Herlihey carried the Blessed Sacrament in procession into the auditorium. Students immediately fell to their knees in worship and recognition of Christ’s presence. As reflective worship music was played, students spread out throughout the auditorium and participated in the sacrament of reconciliation, spoke witness to each other in small groups, and received prayers by groups composed of educators and vocation teams.

Father Herlihey gave the group some food for thought on how to be active in their faith by looking to examples like Carlo Acutis (Archbishop Wood’s school patron), former pro athlete Tim Tebow, and some of our own students.

For many of our students, an evening like this was something that they had never experienced before. They had participated in Archbishop Wood’s monthly First Friday adoration days and received the sacrament of reconciliation in our Advent and Lent reconciliation days. They had experienced praise and worship but not the culmination of it and especially not in their own auditorium.

After the students participated in these prayerful activities for about two hours, the most unique experience took place. Students spread throughout the auditorium before Father Herlihey began to lead a procession with the monstrance through the room. Every student in the front rows was blessed with the opportunity to have Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament right in front of them.

As students throughout the auditorium realized what was happening, they very reverently made their way to the center aisle and fell to their knees in adoration. Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament spent one to two minutes with each student present, as close as a friend would sit with a friend.

In a time when so many Catholics doubt the truth of the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, students were moved to tears as they looked so deeply into the monstrance, to the true Body and Blood of Christ.

Faculty members who witnessed this event could not keep a dry eye. Adults whose faith motivated them to help the students host the event, administrators who were there because it was taking place at their school, and other teachers who attended perhaps out of a desire to know Jesus more simply, wept at the witness of these students.

Having taught many of these students for four years, I have had first-hand experience of watching their faith develop. For some students, this event was a testament that the Lord can take the greatest doubters and give them an unfaltering faith. For others, their joy in their faith was what attracted others to the faith. For other students, it was their first experience of the Catholic faith outside the constructs of Mass and the school day.

I wrapped my arms around one of our greatest witnesses of faith, a Sister of St. Joseph, who has faithfully served our school in music ministry and prayer. We soaked each other’s shoulders with tears, so moved by the experience of watching our students worship the Lord in such holy adoration. We had felt so blessed to be present in the same room as Jesus making miracles happen.

As a theology teacher, it is my job to do everything in my power to teach the Catholic faith and give witness to it. I’ve been blessed to watch faith relationships develop and blossom over the years. I’ve seen the seeds of consideration for religious vocations begin in eucharistic adoration experiences. I have journeyed with students on retreat as they come to the realization just how real God is.

As a Catholic woman and mother, my desire is for all my children, my biological children and the children who I have been entrusted with in the classroom, to know and love the Lord and to take ownership of the faith, making it their own relationship with Jesus.

The statistics are loud — only a small percentage of Catholics believe in the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. But with experiences like that of the FiatFest, faith in the True Presence is being restored and renewed in our young people. It gives me hope for the future of the Church, for strong vocations fostered in experiences of the sacraments and for young people to continue striving toward sainthood.

Not a single teenager was required to be at FiatFest, nor were they told what to do. They were simply invited to participate in any way they felt called, and so many students answered with their own “Fiat”—”Let it be done.”

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Due to the overwhelming success of the event, Archbishop Wood High School will be hosting another FiatFest on Friday, May 15 from 6-9:30 p.m. The event is open to all high school-aged students in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. For more information, contact Rebecca Conte at rebecca.conte@archwood.org.

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Rebecca Conte is a teacher at Archbishop Wood High School in Warminster, Bucks County.