“Have you ever prayed to the Holy Spirit, asking for guidance in making a decision?”

“Do you believe that the Church of Jesus Christ lives on in the Catholic Church?”

These are some of the questions on the university’s new online resource to help Catholic students better understand their faith, the first such resource developed by a university.

The resource, the Catholic Faith Inventory, was originally developed for adults considering converting to Catholicism and other Catholic adults, but Georgetown’s Office of Campus Ministry, collaborating with the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association, began working to create a version for college students in May 2006. The adapted survey, which launched earlier this year, is intended to help Catholic students embrace their faith and increase their understanding of Catholicism in modern society.

“The CFI is an online tool to help [Catholic students] assess what they know, topics of faith about which they might wish to learn more, and how to get in contact with our Catholic Campus Ministry team to explore their questions further if they so desire,” said Fr. Philip Boroughs, S.J., the university’s vice president for mission and ministry.

The CFI is a questionnaire which takes 20 to 30 minutes to complete and consists of over 100 questions on several different topics of Catholic faith. Individuals are scored based on how their results compare with a set of ideal answers consistent with the Roman Catholic tradition. After receiving their results, individuals are encouraged to reflect upon their responses and are offered the opportunity to discuss their experience with a campus minister or as a part of a group of other CFI participants.

Georgetown is the first university to offer the CFI online, and the PNCEA hopes to spread its use to other colleges across the United States.

The project is being coordinated at Georgetown by Sr. Pat Parachini, S.N.J.M., religious literacy project coordinator in the Office of Campus Ministry, along with Fr. Timothy Godfrey, S.J., director of campus ministry.

“The CFI is the consequence of a general awareness among our campus ministry staff that many of our Catholic students do not have adequate understanding of their faith to articulate what they believe and why they believe it,” Boroughs said. “They may be quite active in the liturgical life on campus and participate in retreats and commit to service projects, but many students don’t feel comfortable in describing to others what their faith means.”

Boroughs added: “We also hope that as we hear from a significant number of our Catholic students, Campus Ministry can design programs which will give students opportunities to become more educated about their faith and engage their questions in interesting and informative ways.”

More than 50 Georgetown students have participated in the CFI already this year, according to the university’s Web site.

Parachini said the university is not collecting and analyzing the results of the survey because the CFI “is not a research project.”

She said about 10 universities are using the CFI in pilot form, including the University of Texas, the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley. The PNCEA is in the process of making the survey available to other universities throughout the country.