Students from Carroll University and Waukesha County Technical College enjoy a Tuesday Community Night and Student Dinner at the St. Carlo Acutis Catholic Student Center in Waukesha. (Submitted photo)
In its third year, Waukesha’s collegiate and young adult ministry is growing by leaps and bounds in accompanying the lives of young Catholics.
And its dedicated headquarters now bears the name of a new saint whose life mission embodied that exact calling.
Brew City Catholic’s Waukesha Catholic Student Center is now the St. Carlo Acutis Catholic Student Center, honoring the recently canonized saint who digitally evangelized fellow young people before his death from leukemia at 15 years old.
“We knew that we wanted to take the name of a saint and to come under the patronage and intercession of a saint,” said Emily Czaplewski, Campus Coordinator for the Waukesha arm of Brew City Catholic, a ministry of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
“Since St. Carlo was being canonized this year, it just all fell into place,” she said, and the name change became official Sept. 7, the date he was canonized,
Czaplewski sees how the addition of St. Carlo’s name brings an additional point of reference and relatable connection for young people to the Catholic faith.
“Especially because he’s a young person who is from our generation,” she said, as he was born in 1991. “He so beautifully lived an ordinary life but also invited people to know and love Jesus,” she said.
“That’s what we aspire to do, to live our ordinary lives but to invite people to know Jesus.”
The name will find itself upon a house at 818 N. East Ave. near the Carroll University campus that may seem ordinary but has seen exciting growth in its short lifespan as a Catholic student center.
“In 2023, Brew City Catholic decided that this was the time to expand to Waukesha because we saw the need and the desire, and we had the manpower at that point to do it,” Czaplewski said.
“We were just coming out here to see what the Lord could do and what it would look like in this new frontier.”
The Catholic Community of Waukesha, now Corpus Christi Parish, gave Brew City Catholic use of some of the rooms in the East Avenue home it owns four blocks north of the Carroll University campus.
“We had a meeting place where we could have a home base,” Czaplewski said. “In 2024, we began to have weekly dinners and host more events there.”
By the summer of 2024, they made an agreement with the parish to rent the whole building, allowing them to expand their offerings to the Waukesha young adult community, she said.
Czaplewski says they aim to do it in a way that partially mirrors St. Carlo Acutis’ pathway of merging the digital with the interpersonally transformative encounter that is so much a part of today’s style of evangelization.
“With the digital age, he’s such a good model, because he shows us how to steward these gifts that we have in technology well,” she says.
“Like my generation, this generation coming up after me is really wrestling with it. How do we use technology without letting it use us? He loved video games, he would play them with his friends, but he would limit himself and then go and pray, or go and spend time, like, person to person with his friends or family.”
While Brew City Catholic itself has Instagram and Facebook in its digital arsenal, Czaplewski says the real power of its ministry comes in person with regularly-scheduled opportunities at the student center including Mass, Adoration and Confession, weekly dinner and community nights, and multiple small groups, including one focused on mental health and faith.
“That’s a time for students to just come together. They’ll pray with scripture together. They share about life and what’s going on,” Czaplewski said. “It’s meant to just be a place where people can find connection and community because we’re not meant to live this life alone.”
She adds that often, these gatherings offer one-on-one interpersonal relationship building, the kind that often fosters the deepest advances in someone’s faith.
“There’s something so powerful in just getting to be able to call somebody by name or even just to say, ‘How can I pray for you?’ For them to know somebody actually is praying for them,” said Czaplewski.
Czaplewski invites any young adult, particularly those in college, to check out their offerings and potentially find a greater communion and calling within their lives — both as someone served by Brew City Catholic and serving with them.
“The beauty of a local missionary project is that we get to be directly connected to the renewal of the Church within the archdiocese,” she said.
“For anybody who’s looking for more, come and see. Come and see what the Lord has here. If you’re a young adult and you are just feeling in your heart the desire to do something more, you’re looking for community, you’re looking to grow more in your faith, just ask the Lord if he’s inviting you to mission.”
To connect with Brew City Catholic or support their mission, visit brewcitycatholic.com.
