'The most important subject we teach is hope'

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press

    The eighth-grader was on his hands and knees, serving a detention sentence.
    “I wish I had you in my class,” said the nun whose classroom he was cleaning at St. Mary’s School in Milford. “Do you know why?”
     “So you could straighten me out,” the boy answered.
    “No,” said the sister. “So I could see the good in you.”
    “This happened 46 years ago,” said the storyteller, Father John F. Madden, pastor of St. John Church in Worcester. He said he can still see this scene from his youth.
    Speaking for the Adopt-A-Student Recognition Dinner March 22 at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Father Madden challenged listeners to be about the work of faith, hope and love.
    The dinner and its silent auction raise money for the Adopt-A-Student program to provide financial assistance to students in the diocese’s four central Catholic schools: St. Bernard Central Catholic High in Fitchburg, and, in Worcester, Holy Name Central Catholic Junior/Senior High, St. Peter-Marian Central Catholic Junior/Senior High and St. Peter Central Catholic Elementary.
Since the program began 29 years ago, it has granted nearly 1,300 scholarships totaling more than $4 million, according to a welcome in the program booklet from chairman Robert R. Pape. Dinner leaders lamented Mr. Pape’s absence, due to illness, asked prayers for him, and thanked those who took on the work, including Delma L. Josephson, former superintendent of Catholic schools.
    Highschoolers were given recognition awards. Videos of them and Adopt-A-Student scholars at St. Peter’s Elementary were shown. Stephen Kaufman, production manager for the diocesan Communications Ministry, made the videos.
    Award winners were: Maria Murphy, St. Peter-Marian senior, Paul and Dorothy Kervick Award for Leadership; Alyssa Wentworth, Holy Name senior, Charles & Beth McManus Award for Academic Excellence; Zachary Debs, Holy Name senior, Wilfred & Bette Iandoli Award for Service, and Richard LaJoie III, St. Bernard’s junior, Bill & Kay O’Brien Award for Best Exemplifying the Values of the Adopt-A-Student Program.
    Two scholars received four-year, full-tuition scholarships: Alyssa Wentworth to Anna Maria College and Caden Paul, from St. Peter-Marian, to Assumption College.
    Adopt-A-Student graduate Samantha Sampaio spoke briefly and Bishop McManus led attendees in prayer. Conway and Cameron Campbell of the Holy Name Jazz Combo, directed by Daniel Gabel, entertained the audience.

    Ms. Sampaio said she attended Assumption Elementary School in Millbury, St. Peter’s, and Holy Name, thanks to her mother’s sacrifices. She said her parents divorced and she knew a Catholic education would help her through anything. She graduated from Keene State College and taught in a public charter school.
    But, she said, “I wanted to be able to teach about Jesus, Christmas, Easter,” and Christian morals. Now a first-grade teacher at St. Joseph Elementary School in Webster, she gets to give what she got in Catholic schools, she said. She’s also assistant cheerleading coach with her mother who is the Holy Name cheerleading coach.
    Father Madden said he spent more than 20 years as a student in Catholic schools and 10 working at Holy Name.
    He loved the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Mary’s in Milford and knew they’d dedicated themselves to him and his family and friends, he said.
    “I knew they were ‘up to something,’” he said. “Eventually, I wanted to be ‘up to something’ too.”
    He said Catholic schools led immigrants and their children into the mainstream of American life – they “Americanized” Catholics. Today, the need is to “Catholicize” Americans, he said.
     He gave an idea for how to do that by using the following experience to teach a lesson.
    In a homily, he’d quoted a Haitian woman who said, “I do not have time to be angry; I have too much to do.” She had spoken at a commemoration of the 2010 earthquake that devastated parts of Haiti, just after reports of President Donald Trump making “a derogatory remark” about that nation.
    Father Madden said those covering the commemoration were not there to keep the needs of Haiti and its people before others’ minds; they were there to “keep the fight going.”
    Also trying to keep the fight going were Trump opponents, who reacted positively to his homily, and Trump supporters, who reacted negatively, he said. He called both reactions unhealthy.
    “We don’t have time to be angry,” Father Madden said. “We have too much to do.” Jesus came to bring glad tidings to the poor and to proclaim liberty to captives. Today opioid and suicide epidemics are “concentrated among our children.” The devil is at work.
    “We know that only God can overcome the power of evil,” Father Madden said. The solution to this and all problems is spiritual. But he said people in the grip of the devil can’t see a way out; they’ve lost hope.
    Catholic schools provide an exemplary academic education, but their true identity comes from their mission to help students know God is always present to them, he said.
    “I am convinced that the most important subject we teach is hope,” he said. An important part of “being up to something” is “helping our students to choose hope.”
    
See photo album at:
http://www.catholicfreepress.org/photoalbums/adopt-a-student