At the Far Eastern Catholic Youth Conference, college-age kids get to meet other Catholics from the surrounding parishes in the area while attending talks and discussion groups about Catholicism.

Each year's conference has a theme. The conference for 2003 was entitled, "The Christian Life of Youth." Talks included discussion of the different vocations, both on the natural level (teaching, medicine) and the supernatural level (priesthood, religious life, marriage). The kids also learned about Scripture, apologetics, and marriage preparation.

One of the goals of the Far Eastern Catholic Youth Conference is to promote fellowship among young Catholics, whose parishes are spread out and somewhat geographically isolated from each other. Youth, who often feel lonely and awkward during the transition between childhood and adulthood, are in special need of this fellowship. Long-lasting friendships have resulted, and even some Catholic marriages! Fr. Effing looks forward to this time that he can spend strictly with the young adults, because he is often limited in the regular parish settings, where he has to divide his time between the adults and the youth.

When Fr. Myron began the conference in 1997, he and the pastor in Magadan (a city far to the north of Russia) were the only pastors in the Russian Far East. Since then, other priests have come to Blagoveschensk, Khabarovsk, Sakhalin, Ussurisk, and Nakhodka. The Conference has now become a diocesan event, matched by the Eastern Siberian Catholic Youth Conference, which is held in Irkutsk, at the other end of the diocese. The 2003 conference was underwritten (for the first time) by a grant from RENOVABIS, an organization of the German Bishops' Conference.

Far Eastern Catholic Youth Conference in 1997.