About a month into the school year and Buckeye Catholic ministry at the Columbus St. Thomas More student center by Ohio State University has experienced increasing numbers of students.
The first Sunday of the school year, Aug. 23, drew 1,405 students to Mass. Another 1,613 attended Masses the following weekend.
Daily Masses are offered at St. Thomas More, and the Catholic student center averages between 25 and 50 attendees at morning Masses and another 75 to 100 in the evening.
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Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is held at the student center 50 hours each week.
The sacrament of reconciliation is also offered daily, including weekends. Four hours of confessions are heard on Sundays.
As of early September, Buckeye Catholic’s Instagram page attracted more than 800 new followers and surpassed 500,000 views in the last month.
“Student after student is coming up to us saying, ‘Someone just came to Mass for the first time, they haven’t been to Mass since Confirmation, they haven’t been to Mass since grade school and they love it,'” said Andrew Kebe, director of ministry at Buckeye Catholic.
“We have people that are not Catholic coming to Mass saying, ‘I can’t wait to be Catholic.’ We are seeing some really cool fruit with Greek life, including a lot of interest from Greek students — including the president of a fraternity saying, ‘Hey, I would love to lead a Bible study.'”
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Outreach efforts are largely led by students.
Two missionary teams, Saint Paul’s Outreach (SPO) and FOCUS (formerly the Fellowship of Catholic University Students) — which are apostolates that minister at many colleges across the country — evangelize on Ohio State campus.
Missionaries invite students to attend FOCUS Bible studies and SPO men’s and women’s small groups. The teams are largely comprised of recent college graduates and young adults.
Buckeye Catholic also has 145 student leaders leading Bible studies and small groups in addition to SPO and FOCUS missionaries. Ten members serve on staff.
To kick off the 2026-27 school year, the Catholic center offered a student missionary retreat and week of student activities.
Leaders participated in an involvement fair hosted by Ohio State University on campus. They handed out flyers and met several new first- and second-year students.
Buckeye Catholic offered a votive Mass of the Holy Spirit (not pertaining to the liturgical calendar) on Aug. 18, the first day of classes. Students were invited to gather afterward for a cookout.
Other kickoff week events included men’s and women’s nights, a tailgate Bible study and a hog roast hosted at an SPO house on campus that attracted about 600 students.
“I have been transformed into more of a man who is free to love others, and that is something I’ve never really experienced before,” Noel Maddox, who is in his second year at the university, said of his experience with Buckeye Catholic. “I want to show others how that is possible.”
“I’ve never met a more loving, supporting, fun but yet … challenging community in the way that they call me higher to be a better man,” added student Liam Graney.
“I can have a ton of fun and get good with prayer and all that, but I need to grow as a man, need to grow as someone who’s going to go out in the actual real world, and that’s the thing I love most about this community.”
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Buckeye Catholic anticipates another large Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) class. The student center brought 73 students into the Church last year and reports it has received a higher volume of inquiries so far this year.
As part of a new initiative this school year, Buckeye Catholic launched a Sunday experience team. Students welcome other students to St. Thomas More for Masses.
“We’re having 1,400, 1,600 students come in, we really want them to feel like family, feel like they belong, to understand they’re known and they’re welcome here,” Kebe said. “We’re trying to greet them and help them sit with friends or meet new people, and we have a table where they can register and get more information.”
“As a freshman, those first few weeks of outreach and feeling welcome and feeling like you matter … meant a lot to me because I felt like people cared about me,” said Jack Lee, who is now a second-year student at Ohio State.
Also new this year is a rectory on campus. The rectory is home to Fathers Adam Streitenberger, executive director at Buckeye Catholic, and Michael Haemmerle, the diocese’s director of vocations, who assists at St. Thomas More. The campus rectory enables the priests to be nearer to Ohio State students.
To learn more and support the mission, visit Buckeye Catholic.