Annual appeal helps schools form students into saints

Students study in a classroom at Pope John XXIII School in Madison. The grade school, neighboring Father Michael Shawe Memorial Jr./Sr. High School, also in Madison, and schools across the archdiocese receive support from the “Christ Our Hope: Compassion in Community” annual appeal. (Submitted photo)

By Sean Gallagher

In his first encyclical letter, “Deus Caritas Est” (“God is Love”), Pope Benedict XVI wrote that proclaiming the word of God is an essential component of the “deepest nature” of the Church (#25).

A primary place in which this vital ministry takes place in the Church in central and southern Indiana is in the Catholic schools operated by scores of parishes and at interparochial high schools.

Students of all ages learn of God’s love for them in the person of Jesus Christ, and are formed to become strong in their faith and dedicated citizens in their communities.

In the “Christ Our Hope: Compassion in Community” annual appeal, Catholics in the 151 parishes of the archdiocese will have the chance to support Catholic schools close to their homes. The staff of the archdiocesan Office of Catholic Education (OCE) helps the schools achieve their important mission.

For Harry Plummer, the executive director of the Office of Catholic Education, the goal is clear.

“A Catholic school cannot be understood apart from its obligation to form kids in a manner consistent with their destiny to become saints,” Plummer said. “If we’re not doing that, then … we really aren’t doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”

A new aspect to Christ Our Hope this year is that contributions over the appeal’s goal for each of the five geographic regions will stay in that region to support the Catholic schools there. Those regions include Batesville and Connersville, Bloomington and Seymour, Indianapolis, New Albany and Tell City, and Terre Haute.

Plummer sees this as a good way for Catholics in the archdiocese to help their schools achieve their lofty goal.

Such added assistance would be welcome in schools, where teachers find helping their students to become saints is a real challange.

Nancy Buening, the principal of St. Mary School in Greensburg in the Batesville Deanery, finds ready assistance in accomplishing this task from the OCE staff even though they work approximately 45 minutes away at the Archbishop O’Meara Catholic Center in Indianapolis.

Despite this distance, Buening knows that help is just a phone call or e-mail away.

“Sometimes being this far away, you do kind of feel left out,” she said. “It’s not like it’s a quick drive over to talk with them. But because of the technology that’s available, they’re right there with a response. You still feel like they’re behind you.”

That technology has been ramped up recently as OCE offers web-based seminars to further the training of Catholic school faculty and staff. It has also made available to schools across the archdiocese a “value-added” method of analyzing student performance that Buening appreciates.

“[You can] estimate how much educational gain they should have had in a year’s time, what would have been expected and what they had,” Buening said. “You can say, ‘They passed ISTEP, but they didn’t gain nearly as much as what they were expected to. What’s going on there?’ ”

Overall, Buening sees the OCE staff members as helping her and her staff in Greensburg in a variety of ways to serve their students in the best way possible.

“They are always trying to go above and beyond with everything they do,” she said. “And they want us to do that, too.”

Pope John XXIII School and Father Michael Shawe Jr./Sr. High School, both in Madison, also benefit from the annual appeal.

Jerome Bomholt, the principal of Shawe, said that layoffs at factories in and around Madison have made it hard for families to send their children to the schools.

So Shawe’s tuition assistance initiatives, such as a summer work-study program, have become critical in many families’ efforts to keep their children enrolled.

“We’ve had kids that were able to attend school here that, had those things not been available, probably would not have been able to afford it,” said Bomholt. “But they were allowed some tuition assistance.”

And that assistance has been made possible in part through support that Shawe has received through contributions to Christ Our Hope.

Bomholt praised the help from the appeal, saying “it’s allowed us to do some things that we would never have gotten done . … The archdiocese has been very good to us.”

(For more information about the “Christ Our Hope: Compassion in Community” annual archdiocesan stewardship appeal, log on to www.archindy.org/ChristOurHope.) †