History of the Youth Service

This story begins with Fr Paddy O’Dea and his vision for young people. He was the curate at St Walburge’s in Preston and ran a very successful youth club and Young Christian Worker group. These experiences inspired him to seek to help young people leaving secondary school and to prepare them for the world of work. This was all in a time before career advisers, connexions, and the like. The only problem was that the diocese had no money to support such a venture. Fr O’Dea headed off to Ireland with an empty suitcase and returned a short time later with a suitcase full of money with which he bought Lakeside House in 1963, just besides the putting green in Keswick. With expanding numbers, this house was deemed too small and with the help of grants and monies from the sale of Lakeside House, Castlerigg Manor was bought for the princely sum of £23,000.

Castlerigg Manor is situated on the old Ambleside Road, on a hillside overlooking Derwentwater. To the north stands Skiddaw, Europe’s oldest mountain, and to the South beyond the Jaws of Borrowdale, rises Scafell Pike, the tallest mountain in England. It’s a stunning location. The house had originally been built in the 1840s by the Fenton family as their manor house and later became a hotel. During the Second World War, it was used to billet troops on their field exercises. But it was in 1969 that it was bought up by the Diocese of Lancaster and became the home of the Youth Service.

All of these developments came on the back of a new desire to help young people. In 1960 the Government produced the Albemarle Report which provided the initial stimulus to youth work as we now know it, and the auxiliary bishop of the time, an august figure, the Rt. Rev. Wulstan Pearson, was clear that something needed to be done. In March 1962, Bishop Pearson exclaimed, ‘Take where you will, there exists amongst us a large number of Catholic boys and girls in an atmosphere of drift, and drifting means going along with the current – a current which is not only indifferent to Christ, but often even mortally opposed to Him by the acceptance of sinful practices as the norm of modern life’. Strong stuff, but it certainly got the man on a mission. Thenceforth he was determined to help to form the leaders of tomorrow: ‘Courage needs fostering, and in youth, to be the odd one man out, is to invite attention’. Reflecting upon the particular times that they were going through, Bishop Pearson noted that ‘We have all the material prosperity we need’, but now what was needed was a ‘generation with a spiritual outlook to master it and use it for the benefit of the whole world. That generation depends on those who will inspire by example and teaching – and that means you!’

The Leader Day Courses gradually developed into 2 and 3 day courses, and later into 4 or 5 day courses and parishes and schools began to use the building in ever-increasing numbers. Some of the priests began to train professionally in youth work and the work at Castlerigg was supported by a strong team of Dominican sisters (who remained at Castlerigg until 1979) and an increasing number of volunteers. The focus of courses moved from preparing young people for the transition from school to work to courses that reflected the broader cultural changes which were no longer being catered for in the parish youth groups. Courses began to look more at relationships and playing our part, attitudes and our responsibility, especially to those in the Third World, and of course provided space for young people to reflect upon their relationship with God and the Church.

With the diminishing of parish youth groups, the diocese established a ‘fieldworker’ post to improve the communication between Castlerigg, the schools and the parishes, so that by the early 1990s there were two arms to the youth service, concentrating on separate areas of work. During this time, great strides were made in developing pilgrimages for young people to Lourdes, the World Youth Days, and to other places whilst Castlerigg continued to busy throughout the year with school groups. Under Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue, these two arms of the youth service were re-united with a new lay director, a chaplain, retreat leaders and a team of volunteers who form the heart of a mission team, running both the retreats in Castlerigg and supporting the work out in the diocese.