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PAGE 2—The Southern Cross, April 10,1975
CATHOLIC EDUCATORS
Cautious Optimism Is Mood of NCEA Convention
BY JO-ANN PRICE
ATLANTIC CITY, N. J. (NC) - One
of the most popular posters the nuns
were buying in novelty shops along the
Boardwalk of Atlantic City during the
Easter Week 72nd annual National
Catholic Educational Association
convention was the one with the
marmalade cat clinging to a bamboo
pole, and the words: “Hang in there,
baby. Friday’s coming.”
The words, curiously, summarized a
mood of cautious optimism, voiced by
clergy and laity here, about American
Catholic education generally. The note
was sounded in a welter of speeches --
many of which were otherwise
incomprehensibly full of professional
jargon -• but more often in the
semi-social gatherings of the educators,
at lunch or over cocktails.
The educators seemed to be saying
that the end of a long dark tunnel had
been reached. A decade of deep gloom
about finances, morale, faith, buildings,
the teaching apostolate, enrollments was
passing.
Educators, indeed, the Catholic
“system” itself must be doing
something right, they mused. And after
quite a while of feeling slightly
unwanted on the American educational
and religious horizons, the educators
were rediscovering the uniqueness of
their calling and the worth of their
teaching commitment to the ranks of
the people of God and society in
general.
“The optimism is very noticeable at
this meeting,” reflected Bishop
Raymond J. Gallagher of Lafayette,
Ind., retiring board chairman of NCEA,
in an interview with NC News Service.
“It’s a sense, I think, that the worst of
times is behind us, of greater
spontaneous school support from
Catholic families for Catholics schools,
and a feeling that the schools are worth
preserving.”
The NCEA convention, with its
theme of “Seeking a Just Society,”
appeared to some to go far beyond the
boundaries of classroom, Religious
community discipline, diocesan school
systems and all the other inside things
associated with Catholic education. Why
should it be concerned with, say, the
aging, world hunger, racial injustice, the
United Farm Workers of America,
poverty, the ecclesial role of women and
so forth?
Would it continue to do so?
“Education,” continued Bishop
Gallagher, responding, “is an essential to
the formation of life patterns, lifestyles,
life goals. Many of our problems of
justice arise from myth, prejudice and
half-knowledge. Education can lead to
the substitution of knowledge for
prejudice.”
Morale among the educators has been
boosted by a number of factors. Recent
NCEA figures indicate that the decline
in schools and pupils has decreased for
three consecutive years. There is greater
appreciation of the unique quality of
education where the worth of the
individual pupil is recognized.
The teaching Sisters, their numbers
thinned from drop-outs, are better
trained professionally and, since Vatican
NCEA SCENES -- There’s more to attending the National Catholic
Education Association than just hearing speakers. These two Sisters show
some of the sidelights available. One checks a book display with new
offerings and another enjoys a stroll between sessions along Atlantic City’s
famous boardwalk. (NC Photos)
Council II, more revitalized - if that is
possible - in their Religious vocation in
a renewed Church. Laymen on school
boards and in classrooms have injected
the freshness of a differing view of the
educational challenge as well as
hard-headed business know-how,
enriching the whole process.
Their own words, from conversations,
speak better than generalities about the
mood.
“Parents want the Catholic school,”
observed Father Robert Shuda, 43,
director of education of the Diocese of
Greensburg, Pa., which has 225,000
Catholics and some 42,000 pupils in*
Catholic schools at all levels. “They say
that their youngsters get more of an
education, that the teachers have a good
spirit and appreciate that the teachers
know individual students advance at
different speeds.
“The Christian teaching in Catholic
schools make them different. You’re
not just teaching ‘honesty is the best
policy’ but that we Christians are all in
one great human family. That’s
important. It is hopeful.”
“There is more lay involvement
now,” said Mrs. Dorothy French of
Bethesda, Md., a specialist in early
childhood education, who was a speaker
at the meeting. “We used to leave it to
the Sisters. But now we’re working
toward the creation of schools that are
really serving the needs of the
community. Now we - the laity -- see
ourselves more as teachers. Education is
becoming community-oriented rather
than school-oriented.”
After a speech by Cardinal George
Flahiff of Winnipeg, Canada, concerning
the “reaffirmation” of members of
Religious communities to their
vocations in the teaching apostolate,
Sister Mary Cecilia Ward, a high school
consultant to the Diocese of Pittsburgh,
spoke up.
“I’m so glad you said something good
about Catholic schools,” she exclaimed.
She later remarked that she was sick of
hearing doom-and-gloom speeches about
Catholic education.
In his talk, the Canadian cardinal
reminded his audience that “the
apostolate of the Religious teacher has
come to be seen not just as a work to be
done, but as an expression of the
apostolate of Christ Himself.
Five years ago, Bishop Lawrence
Casey of Paterson, N.J., chose a
15-member diocesan school board to
make policy for the See’s elementary
and high schools.
“He let us go ahead and make our
own mistakes,” said Gerald J. McKenna
of Wayne, N. J., a retired businessman
who is president of the board. It has a
majority of laymen who are not
professional educators. The bishop
explicitly wished not to exercise his
veto power.
“The business of save-the-Catholic-
school-at-any-cost was overdone in the
past,” McKenna said. “Those with
cooler heads have realized that what we
were going through was not financial
but a crisis of spirit by pastors, parents
and Church leaders.”
There have been two school
consolidations in the diocese, McKenna
said. Each was a “wrench,” he said. But
during the same period, with many
Sisters leaving, the qualifications for
remaining teaching nuns were going up,
and no one can be hired with a college
degree.
He indicated that “whenever the
story of the improved quality of
Catholic schools is told,” they are given
greater support than previously.
v
Throughout the convention, speakers
told of pioneering efforts in education -
coalitions of schools, rescheduled school
hours so older members of the same
parish can have adult education classes,
and flexible, untried uses of education
tools in Catholic classrooms. And the
educators were hanging in there.
DONALSONVILLE DEDICATION-APRIL 20TH
BY FR. O’LEARY, O.F.M.
In this glorious season of the Risen,
Triumphant Christ, it is a symbolic sign
of the close mystical union between our
Divine Savior and IBs Spotless Bride; <
the Church, to see a part of that
Church, a local part, rise again
triumphant and vigorous from the dead
ashes of forgotten history.
On Sunday afternoon of April the
twentieth, 1975, at 4:30, Bishop
Lessard will dedicate a new Catholic
chapel in Donalsonville, in Seminole
County, just three hundred years since
the first Catholic church was dedicated
in that area by the Bishop of Santiago
de Cuba, Gabriel Diaz Vara Calderon.
Bishop Lessard will give the same title
to this new chapel that Bishop Calderon
gave to the first Catholic Church there,
the title of the Incarnation, the
fundamental mystery of our Christian
religion.
The first Catholic church in the area
of Seminole County was founded by the
36th Annual Convention
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Spanish Franciscan missionaries in the
year 1673, in the Indian village of
Sabacola, at the confluence of the Flint
and Chattahoochee Rivers, in the
extreme southwest corner of Georgia.
On Feb. 28, 1675, Bishop Calderon
came to this distant Indian Village on
his episcopal visitation and dedicated
the church that had been built there and
named by the Franciscan friars, “The
Church of the Holy Cross of Sabacola”.
Bishop Calderon added a new title to it,
“La Encamacion a la Santa Cruz de
Sabacola”, or “The Incarnation at the
Holy Cross of Sabacola”.
We may ask: How did Bishop
Calderon come to officiate at the
dedication of that far-distant mission
church? It was not the Pope, but a
woman, Queen Mariana of Spain, a
fervent Catholic, who directed Bishop
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Calderon in 1673 to make an episcopal
visitation of the provinces of La Florida,
which were within his ecclesiastical
jurisdiction. On August 23, 1674,
Bishop Calderon arrived in St.
Augustine to begin his visitation. His
first episcopal act was to ordain seven
young priests on the following day, the
first instance of priestly ordinations
within the present territory of the
United States. Soon, he began his
visitation, a full report of which he sent
to Queen Mariana at the end of his long
and arduous journey.
The Bishop began with the visitation
of St. Augustine, whose parish and
military chaplaincy were in charge of
the diocesan clergy. While he considered
the physical conditions very unhealthy,
he found that the parish and its various
works were adequately served. Then the
Bishop had to set out on the visitation
of the many missions. These were served
by the Spanish Franciscans who had
two main lines of missions among the
various Indian nations. One line
stretched west, going as far as the
Apalachicola River. The other ran up
along the Georgia coastline as far as St.
Catherine’s Island. The Bishop chose to
follow the western line first, along the
old Indian trails that the friars had made
their own and on which they wore out
the three pairs of boots that the Spanish
government allowed them each year.
The first mission was only a short
distance from the city, a small Indian
village called “Nombre de Dios” (Name
of God). From here the trail led to
beyond the present location of
Tallahassee. First, the Bishop entered
the Indian province of Timucua and
found there eleven missions, stretching
from St. John’s River to the Santa Fe
and Suwannee Rivers, and finally
coming to the mission of San Miguel de
Asyle, near the Aucilla River, which
formed the northern boundary of the
province.
The Bishop now crossed into the
country of the Apalache, where he
found thirteen missions, in the present
area of Jefferson and Leon Counties. He
eventually came to the largest of these
western missions, San Luis de Talimali,
situated about two miles west of
present-day Tallahassee. The Bishop
wrote in his report that he himself
founded two missions in the country of
the Apalache, namely, La Purificacion
and Assumpcion on Jan. 27 and Feb. 2,
1675, respectively. Bishop Calderon
proceeded still further to the west and
entered the Indian province of
Apalachicola, which is of special interest
to us today.
He wrote in his report: “At two
leagues from the aforementioned village
of San Luis, on the northern frontier, is
the river Agna, which divides the
provinces of Apalache and Apalachicola,
and at a distance of twelve on the bank
of another large and copious river which
takes its name from that province and
runs through it from north to south, is a
heathem village, called formerly Santa
Cruz de Sabacola el Menor, now La
Encarnacion a la Santa Cruz de
Sabacola, the church having been
dedicated to this sovereign mystery on
Thursday, Feb. 28th of this year
(1675), wherein have gathered the great
Cacique of that province, with his
vassals from Sabacola el Grande, which I
have converted to our Holy Faith, and
which will be a large town and
converted (area), especially as the
thirteen Apalachicolan villages which
are on the bank of the river of that
name, thirty leagues to the north, have
offered to do likewise.”
At the end of his report, Bishop
Calderon gave an interesting report of
the habits and religious fervor of the
Indians. They attended Mass with
devotion on the holy days and Sundays.
Before entering the church, each one
brought to the house of the priest a log
of wood as a contribution. They did not
talk in church. The women stayed on
the Epistle side; the men, on the Gospel
FOLK CHOIR WORKSHOP -- The Folk Group from St. Peter Claver’s,
Macon, is pictured at the Folk Choir Workshop held in Augusta April 4th
and 5th. Purpose of the gathering was to provide an opportunity for
participants to share their accomplishments in style, repetoire,
organizations and musicianship so that they could learn from each other.
I
side. They were very devoted to the
Virgin Mary and attended the Rosary
and Salve on Sunday afternoons. On
Christmas Eve, they went to Midnight
Mass and brought offerings of loaves,
eggs and other foods. They did great
penances during Holy Week. During the
twenty-four hours of Holy Thursday
and Good Friday, they attended services
standing, praying the rosary in complete
silence, in groups of 24 men, women
and children for each hour. The children
went to a religious school where they
were taught by an interpreter.
With this description, Bishop
Calderon ended his report to Queen
Mariana. His visitation had lasted ten
months. He had inspected every mission
in the far-flung Spanish-American
province of La Florida. He had
confirmed 13,152 Christian Indians and
Spaniards, corrected what needed to be
corrected in the life of the mission
Church, begun or restored six doctrinas,
and spent the equivalent of eleven
thousand dollars to better the condition
of the Indians. He returned to Cuba in
late June of 1675 and died there a year
later, probably from the hardships and
suffering he had endured during his long
visitation.
The building of this amazing mission
network had demanded supreme
patience, many prayers, sacrifices,
complete dedication and even the
life-blood of some of the missionaries.
Unfortunately, the coastal missions of
Georgia and most of the interior
missions were destroyed by the
English-led invasions from South
Carolina in the years 1702 to 1704.
However, since God can put new flesh
on dead bones, He can also raise up new
children to His Church. Many Catholic
churches and chapels now flourish along
the old mission trails and sea routes.
The new mission chapel of the
Incarnation in Donalsonville recalls
one of the most westerly points in the
visitation of Bishop Calderon and in the
mission network of the Spanish
Franciscans. v
7
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