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When Rev. Ryan Truss (’16) jokingly put forward the idea of offering the Sacrament of Confession at a county fair last year, he never expected to go through with it — much less for his idea to go viral on Catholic social media.

“I was at the fair, talking to someone who mentioned they had not been to Confession in a while, and I said, ‘Well, maybe we should set up a confessional here!’” explains Fr. Truss, the associate pastor at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish and St. John Gildehaus Parish in Washington, Montana. “It was originally a joke, but in the months that followed, the idea kept coming back to me in such a way that I though this may be from the Holy Spirit.”

So, when the local fair came around once again, he set up a small confessional booth with a kneeler and screen, placing a sign that read “Confessions at the Fair!” in front of his station. “I was worried, at first, that people might disrespect the sacrament,” he admits. “I asked the Carmelite Sisters in St. Louis to pray for the booth’s success.”

The sisters’ prayers were answered: Fr. Truss did not experience any backlash to his confessional booth. Instead, he saw an overwhelmingly positive reception, as over 50 people came to him over the fair’s duration to give confessions, many of whom had not received the sacrament in years. Others stopped by to ask for prayers, talk through issues they were struggling with, or discuss theological questions.

“One Southern Baptist woman came and said, ‘You know, Father, I don’t mean any disrespect, but I think we can go straight to Jesus. What are you doing?’” Fr. Truss relates. “She ended up sitting down and we had a really good conversation, where I asked her to read John, Chapter 6, about the Eucharist. She came back to me the next day and said, ‘Father, I had never read anything like that before, and I’ve got to do some thinking now.’”

As the fair progressed, a of Fr. Truss’s booth was uploaded to the social media platform X. It garnered tremendous attention, circling the feeds of Catholic audiences for days. “The attention was almost entirely positive,” says Fr. Truss. Fellow Catholics praised the priest’s evangelical efforts in the comments, noting that it would be great to see similar booths pop up around the country.

Fr. Truss is no stranger to this kind of evangelization. Last year, he began offering confessions at recess to middle schoolers at his parishes’ schools. The children lined up between games to receive the sacrament, a sight that Fr. Truss sees as a resurgence of faith among young Catholics.

“The younger generation is rediscovering the sacraments in an amazing way,” he says. “I have lots of kids trying to bring their parents back to Mass, back to the sacraments. For a good portion of the older generation, the reverence and necessity for the sacraments was lost for a while, but it’s great to see the kids drawing their parents back in and helping them rediscover the beauty of the Faith.”