St. Stephen's memories ring bells

WORCESTER – Memories and gratitude flowed along with tears, as alumni and families of St. Stephen School returned Saturday.

They attended the Lord’s Day vigil Mass at St. Stephen Parish, toured the school and alumni room and bought tote bags and small replicas of the school and church to help fund the church’s bell tower repairs.
They raised nearly $12,000 for those repairs, and need to order more replicas, said Kathleen Foley, chairwoman of the parish council and co-chairwoman of the event planning committee, from the high school Class of 1970.
About 200 people came, and some who didn’t come because of the coronavirus pre-ordered replicas, she said. She said alumni shared on Facebook that it was so sad that the school closed, but a beautiful day to remember it and see people again.
St. Stephen’s was serving students in pre-kindergarten through grade 8 when it closed this spring in the face of declining enrollment and financial concerns. The high school closed in 1971. It had been part of the diocese’s central Catholic school system for awhile.
Alumni from the high school and elementary school reminisced Saturday.
“I used to visit my first-grade teacher … when she was still teaching and after she stopped teaching,” Kathleen (Mahoney) McClintock (high school Class of 1969) said of Sister Louise Marie Assad, a Sister of St. Joseph, now deceased, who she invited to her wedding.
“She was the tiniest nun and she had 65 children (to teach) … I was so inspired by the fact that someone by herself could instill a sense of ‘we were all important, we could all learn.’ I just felt such a connection to her. She taught me to read. She taught me to write. … I remember the art projects. … She taught everything all day long to that many children.”
“I think she was the favorite,” added Mrs. McClintock’s classmate Donna (Walsh) Warren.  “She had a chatterbox club and I was the president.”
Ms. Warren said someone asked her why she would bother to go see the school again and she replied, “That was 12 of the best years of my life.”
“In our school for 100 years children have been educated,” Msgr. Robert K. Johnson, St. Stephen’s pastor, said in his homily, speaking of growth in faith, hope and love. “Thanks be to God.” He also expressed thanks for the blessings teachers and families received.
He urged alumni to “remember what it is you have taken from there that has made you better and stronger,” and added, “Let us give thanks for the school … but also for you.”
“A lot of people put the nuns down: ‘They hit us,’” said Catherine Gengel (high school Class of 1967). “But I thank them for my spirituality – my parents and the nuns. And what an education we got! … Spanish in 1965. I used to … say, ‘What am I going to use this for?’ I ey Vigliatura had another sweet memory: doing “yard duty” at recess and distributing candy to young students, after her children graduated from St. Stephen’s.         
“To this day, people see her in the grocery store and say, ‘You’re the candy lady,’” said her daughter Kathy DiGiorgio, there with her mother and sisters, Patricia Aboody and Mary Stolarczyk.
“The fourth-grade nun used to feed our dog Sparky,” who frequented the school, said Mrs. Stolarczyk.
“That was a blast from the past,” Mrs. DiGiorgio said after touring the school.
“It just brought back memories,” said Mrs. Stolarczyk. “Everything did look so little.” (Things seemed bigger when they were little.)
The students may have been small, but they left their mark, sometimes literally.
“When my brother (Stephen O’Shea) was in second grade (about 45 years ago) he shook up his grape soda, recalled Maureen Silenzi. He got his teacher to open it and it spurted up.  On Saturday family members identified a still-visible spot that they said was a result.
More recent alumni had a similar story.
“There’s a black dot in seventh-grade,” said Brianna Millan, (eighth-grade Class of 2015).
“It was from some sort of toy,” explained her classmate Ian Dyer. “One day I threw it on the ceiling and it stuck there.”
In one classroom, Julian Rodrick, 9, and his brother Tyson, 7, rang a hand bell while their mother, Kailie Rodrick, of the eighth-grade Class of 1999, cried. She said her sons attended St. Stephen’s until it closed last spring.
“I’m devastated,” said Lisa Villa. “I was a St. Mary’s girl and St. Mary’s closed too” last spring. She said she went to St. Mary’s Schools from grade 1-12, graduating in 1986. Her children, now in high school and older, attended St. Stephen’s.
“I knew it was the school for us when the uniforms were the same as St. Mary’s,” she said. “Our dream for our children was to have them educated in a Catholic school. We found one that was an extension of our family,” reinforcing what she and her husband, Michael, were trying to teach them.
She said they are all grateful for the teachers’ sacrifices. In a “world spinning out of control,” she said, Catholic schools are “so important to keep our faith going.” Catholic schools “help anchor that faith at such a young age. … And to be nurtured by such loving people … I just love Catholic schools.”nded up being a social worker,” doing bilingual work for 15 years.
“They were tough, but they prepared us for life,” her classmate Deacon Robert Dio, who serves at St. Peter Parish and St. Andrew the Apostle Mission, said of the nuns.
“We always walked to school,” went home for lunch, got soda bottles to return for cash, and bought candy with it on the way back to school, he said.
Bett

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