Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend
Students offer birthday blessings for Pope Benedict XVI
By Mary Ann Hughes (Message staff writer)
On April 16, during his visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate his 81st birthday.
As part of the celebration, students in schools, parish religious education programs, colleges and seminaries have pledged community service time in his name.
The project is being spearheaded by the National Catholic Educational Association and includes canned food drives, visiting nursing homes and improving the environment.
“Young people have a passionate desire to make a difference,” said NCEA president Karen Ristau. “They are very creative and often know exactly what they can do to help someone or make an impact on their corner of the world.”
Donna Halverson, diocesan director of schools, said, “We look forward to the papal visit to America. NCEA has asked all Catholic schools to give a birthday blessing gift of public service to Pope Benedict XVI.
“Service is a hallmark of Catholic education from the kindergarten student who collects items for Birthright and ‘hops’ for Easter Seals to the middle school student who volunteers for Toys for Tots and sends care packages to the soldiers serving overseas. This focus of community service continues in our high schools where students work at the Special Olympics and volunteer to coach both sports and academic teams in our grade schools.
“In dedicating these service hours to the Holy Father, our students are demonstrating the mission of the church to ‘serve others.’”
Benedictine Sister Geraldine Hedinger, diocesan director of the Office for Adult Formation, agrees. “Encouraging students to send ‘birthday blessings’ for the pope brings an awareness of the larger universal church for them.”
Mary Ann Zenthoefer is the DRE at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Haubstadt and at Holy Cross Church, Fort Branch.
She said the religious education students at both parishes will be participating in Eucharistic Adoration on the night of the pope’s birthday.
Father Tony Ernst, pastor, and Father Gary Kaiser, associate pastor, will have a 10 to 15 minute presentation that evening as they explain Eucharistic Adoration to the students “and what that means for their lives,” Zenthoefer said.
“We have about 311 students signed up,” she said, “and about 200 usually gather.” She plans to divide the students into three groups – primary, middle school and high school – with each group spending about 15 minutes in the church doing Eucharistic Adoration.
Zenthoefer said the religious education students will also be participating in a service project as part of a “spiritual bouquet” for the pope’s birthday.
“I was talking with Sister T. [Benedictine Sister Teresa Gunter, youth minister] about what to do for a spiritual bouquet. We thought about cleaning up God’s green earth as a bouquet for the pope.”
They decided to invite the students to clean up litter on the back road between Haubstadt and Fort Branch. They plan to do this on May 3 which is a Saturday.
“We will have opening prayer at 8:30, and then have farm trucks out there. They can bag up the litter and throw it onto the trucks.” The group will start at Haubstadt and finish in Fort Branch with a pizza lunch.
Ron Pittman, principal at St. Wendel School, St. Wendel, said, “Each class was asked to commit their ‘time, talent and treasure’ by choosing a community service project.
“These projects included fund raisers for local charities, fund raisers to sponsor needy children overseas, fund raisers for a Catholic school in Haiti, the parish pen pal project, care packages for servicemen and women from the St. Wendel area, and cleaning the church. The total number of community service hours logged is 443 hours.”
Students at Rivet Middle School in Vincennes will be cleaning the grounds at Highland Woods Park on the last day of school, said Janice Vantlin-Jones, principal. “It should take about three hours with 102 students.”
Joan Fredrich, principal at Holy Rosary School, Evansville, said each of the seven Memorial High School feeder schools will dedicate 2,000 service hours. Students at Memorial will offer 4,000 hours to the pope as birthday gifts. [The seven feeder schools include St. John the Baptist School, Newburgh, and Christ the King, Good Shepherd, Holy Rosary, Holy Spirit, St. Benedict Cathedral and St. Theresa schools, all in Evansville.]
“This will be over 18,000 hours.
“Our schools participate in a great deal of service throughout the school year including programs/projects/activities such as collecting canned food, donating money to local charities/programs (Ozanam Family Shelter, food kitchens), participating in Hop-N-Ing and Hoop Shoot which benefit Easter Seals and the local Rehabilitation Center, Reuse-A-Shoe (collecting used gym shoes for recycling into playground cover for Katrina area and others, adopting families, working at Special Olympics, volunteer coaching, participating in Relay for Life, babysitting for church programs, working at speech meets, organizing and participating in benefit for local children and volunteering in soup kitchens.”
Theresa Berendes, principal at St. Theresa School, Evansville, said her students have completed several community projects and continue to work on a few more. “This year our students have completed projects such as donating toys to the House of Bread and Peace, canned food drive, written letters to soldiers, collected donations for several homeless shelters.
“We continue projects to better our environment and reduce the amount of materials sent to the landfill. We are working on projects such as our athletic shoe recycling program in which we have already collected over 600 pairs of shoes. We are also recycling plastic products and aluminum cans.”
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