Bishop Michael Martin gets to know young people from the Diocese of Charlotte as they prepare to ride the thrilling Thunder Striker at Carowinds on Catholic Family Day July 28.CHARLOTTE — Nearly 500 young people and their parents packed into Harmony Hall at Carowinds Sunday for Mass with Bishop Michael Martin, who had fun with the crowd, preached to the youth – and rode the “Thunder Striker” rollercoaster, formerly known as “The Intimidator.”
Yes, he screamed. He held tight, too. He also practiced what he preached, choosing to wait in line for the ride with everybody else rather than skipping to the front when the offer came.
It was a fitting choice given the message of his homily an hour earlier when he compared much of life not to the thrill of a rollercoaster, but rather, to the tedium of waiting in line.
“Every day isn't like a rollercoaster ride,” he said. “Most days are like standing in line – where we have to be with our brothers and sisters, where we have to do things we might not want to do, where we have to wait.”
The bishop encouraged the young people to use their time in line Sunday to think about Jesus, resist sin, and change the way they might behave “when sin creeps in” during mundane times.
“In the line today, I'm just going to ask you to think about all the things you have to do at home that maybe you're not crazy about and say, ‘Lord, give me your love, give me your grace, give me your patience, give me your strength to do hard things that may not be as fun as a rollercoaster ride.”
Bishop Martin greeted people and posed for photos before and after Mass, which drew a multicultural crowd for Catholic Family Day at Carowinds. It was a simple Mass with just two altar servers on stage in a room full of picnic tables, lit partly by a screen with projected stained glass.
His 14-minute homily took on a call-and-response quality, where he engaged the crowd by asking questions, coaxing answers, and joking about scary rides and all the sweet treats parents would buy for their children. At one point, he asked the crowd to say ‘hello’ to 7-year-old John Scibor, who stands about 50 inches tall and was pining for the day that he would hit 54 inches, so that he could ride the rollercoaster. With Jesus, the bishop said, there are no height limits.
John’s parents, St. Matthew parishioners David and Carissa Scibor, praised the communion the event offers. “When they do things like this, it brings all of us as Catholics from all around Charlotte together,” Carissa Scibor said, “and I love that we can hear and pray through the Latin and the Spanish. It reminds our children and reminds us that we’re part of the universal Church, and I think we’ve lost that a little bit.”
Bishop Martin compared the young people’s excitement for the day to the feeling shared by the followers of Jesus at the Sea of Galilee, the subject of the day’s Gospel reading. He explained how Jesus transformed “a little bit of food” into enough to feed 5,000 – and how that miracle, was much like the miracle of his presence at Sunday’s Mass, which the bishop said would provide “nourishment far better than the Raptor or the Copperhead Strike, or whatever other rollercoaster we could ever get on.”
Waiting for the Thunder Striker, Elon University sophomore Christina Skelly stood in line with the bishop chatting and joking with others.
“We made the most out of our time in line,” said Skelly, a parishioner at St. Charles Borromeo in Morganton, acknowledging his homily message. “He’s really good at connecting with younger kids, great personality, very bubbly.”
Minutes later she boarded the rollercoaster and set off on what Carowinds calls “the tallest, fastest, longest hyper coaster in the Southeast” – which hits speeds of 80 mph in its extreme drops – with her bishop.
“It’s my favorite ride in the whole park and it was so awesome to get to ride it with the bishop,” she said. “I can check that one off my bucket list.”
— Liz Chandler. Photos by Troy Hull. Videography by Cesar Hurtado.
