Missionaries of the New Millennium
Momentum: The Official Journal of the National Catholic Education Association. September/October 2000. Pp. 23-24.

Dr. Mary C. McDonald

I remember when I was in first grade, Sister would walk up and down the rows, checking each student’s progress as we worked silently at our desks. I never had to look up to see when my turn would come. I knew I was next by the faint scent of Yardley Soap and the gentle rattle of Sister’s rosary beads on my wooden chair as she leaned over my shoulder. She would quietly tap her finger on my paper, indicating a mistake. Correcting it was always a mystery to me, but not to Sister. Sister knew everything. She even knew that God loved me. I was never quite sure if He had told her directly or if it was something she read in my file. But I knew it must be true because “Sister said.” She said I was His child. And like a loving Father, God wanted the best for me. He also wanted me to bring home to Him my best self, and she would teach me how.

So, for the next 20 years of my education in Catholic schools and colleges, in class after class, school after school, the sisters, priests, brothers, and lay teachers taught me how to bring home to my Father in Heaven my best self. Oh yes, they also gave me excellent academic instruction that prepared me well for a world yet to exist. It was a preparation grounded in Catholic character development, accountability, responsibility, and love. It was a rhetoric I saw lived out in reality every day. It is a rhetoric that is still lived out in our Catholic schools. Today this reality takes place in an environment that is created by the Catholic schoolteacher.

Since the time Christ said to Simon, “Thou art Peter,” Catholic educators have known many titles: Apostle, Disciple, Follower, Father, Sister, Brother, Teacher. All, regardless of their outward presence, are witness to their inner faithfulness, to their commitment to spreading God’s Good News. They have dared to touch the hem of the garment of the Master Teacher and follow Him on a journey on the road less traveled. God calls them to this vocation; He qualifies them to do His work. And they, and their families, regardless of the sacrifice, say “yes” to His call, “yes” to the vocation of teaching.

These educators weather the winds of change and the ridicule of a secular world centered in materialism. They hold fast to the mission. They are “heirs to the world through the righteousness of faith . . . who against hope, believed in hope.” (Romans 4:13,18). Where would we be without them, these teachers in the Catholic schools? Their reward is from God and rests in the knowledge that they pass on our faith and our heritage. They educate and shape the future Church as well as the future world. Their recognition will be from God Himself in their welcome home: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Catholic education has survived a great struggle. Thirty-five years ago, when I began teaching in a Catholic high school in Philadelphia, I was one of a handful of laypersons, all in the math department, on a faculty of about 100 priests, brothers, and sisters. Ten years later, not just in that school, but in Catholic schools all over the country, the reverse was true. There were few professed religious left in Catholic schools anywhere. The educators who have remained in Catholic schools over the past 30 years understood the vital educational mission of our Church, but did not always know, or understand, how to assume the leadership necessary to keep it alive. So we cut a path through uncertainty - learning, growing, expanding our vision, determined to keep Catholic schools afloat.

But all through that struggle, we remembered, and that’s what kept us going. We remembered what it was like to be in a Catholic school. We remembered that it was there, in the dedication of the teachers, lay and religious, that we learned who we are and who we could become. We learned to care for others and how to give back. We learned a healthy fear of authority, and we learned forgiveness. There was a certain sadness among us that things could no longer be as they once were. But there was also a determination to give to future generations this great gift of Catholic education. So we worked harder than we knew we could to reclaim our heritage, to reinvent ourselves and make everything old new again.

That is where we are today in the Diocese of Memphis. In July 1999, Bishop J. Terry Steib, SVD, Bishop of Memphis, announced a plan that has been referred to as nothing short of a miracle. Several donors, who chose to remain anonymous, gave a multi-million dollar donation as seed money to secure the reopening of six long-closed Catholic parish schools in Memphis’s inner city. Bishop Steib dubbed them “Jubilee Schools,” honoring the Old Testament tradition of a year of mercy to the poor, and the upcoming Jubilee Year 2000. The six schools are located in under-served areas in Memphis. Their reopening reclaimed our heritage in the mission of education and once again met the needs of children in poverty and children of a new immigrant population. These schools are for all children. We teach the children, not because they are Catholic, but because we are. That is our vocation. Catholic education is a mission in our Church and the teachers in the Catholic schools are the missionaries of the new millennium.

After the announcement, I was constantly asked, “Who will you get to teach there? No one will go into those neighborhoods. How will you ensure the Catholic identity with so few Catholic children?”

But teaching in a Catholic school is not just a job, it is a vocation. It is a call by God to do His work. And because God has already provided us with the miracle of reopening these schools, I trusted Him to call those who were needed to serve in them. I was not disappointed.

The first to come were lay teachers, ordinary people with a missionary heart who wanted to do God’s work. As Sally Hermsdorfer, the Memphis Assistant Superintendent, like to say, “God call them. I don’t have to find them; I don’t have to convince them; I just have to be here when the phone rings.”

The next miracle for our Jubilee schools came when the Christian Brothers became the first religious order to partner with the Diocese in this initiative. Brother Tom Johnson, Christian Brothers Midwest District Provincial, said, “This project calls us back to the Brothers’ beginning when John Baptist de La Salle founded schools, not unlike the Jubilee Schools, to serve those who had no education alternatives. The Brothers agreed to the unique partnership and to operate the renovated school now called De La Salle at Blessed Sacrament School. The school is owned by the Diocese of Memphis and funded through the Jubilee Schools and Scholarship Fund. The Christian Brothers are responsible for the operation and educational mission of the school in the LaSallian tradition. Brother Mark Snodgrass, a young Brother from Kansas City, will be the first principal. The Brothers, too, have reclaimed their heritage.

Shortly after the Brothers’ announcement, The Sisters of the Holy Family, an African-American congregation of Pontifical status from New Orleans, answered the call to staff St. Augustine Jubilee School. “We welcome the opportunity to assist the Catholic schools in the Diocese of Memphis with their commitment to the poor and under-served in the city,” said Sr. Marie deMontfort, SSF. “This is our mission, too, to minister to the most abject of society.”

Another who heard the call was Sr. Grace Saia, a Sister of Charity of Nazareth. Since 1996 she has been the founding principal of Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in a suburban area of Memphis. After 50 years of ministry, she was looking forward to “downsizing” her workload in the near future. Now that her school was up and running she could turn over the leadership to someone who would take the school to the next level. Yet instead of enjoying the semi-retirement she had planned, she stepped forward and volunteered to serve in a Jubilee School. Now, at age 72, she is starting another school. “I am deeply honored at the trust placed in me by Bishop Steib and Dr. McDonald,” she said. “I am grateful to have been a part of the pioneer spirit at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It is the flame of that undaunted spirit that I will take with me to re-light the torch of Catholic education at St. John Jubilee School. I want to help reclaim the heritage of my order and of the school.”