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$6.00 Per Year
at work were Ray Diodati (left), Nevin Patton,
III, Dave Jeanmougin, Jim Whitney, Father
Patrick Mulhern, pastor of St. Mary’s, and M. G.
Turner.
Saint Mary’s Proudly Builds
SISTER MIRIAM TROY, now serving in her
eighth year as principal of St. Mary’s School in
Rome, turns the first shovel of earth at the
groundbreaking to launch construction of a new
addition to the parochial school. Watching Sister
She gazed at the face of the
foundling nestled in her arms. The
body was dead, almost in a state of
decomposition as the awful leprosy
reached into the final stages of total
strangulation. Only the eyes lived. It
was as if life was trapped inside those
big eyes that begged for one last
favor.
And smiling Mother Teresa knew
what the wasted dying leper of
Calcutta’s gutter wanted.
Thursday, November 1, 1979
Ground Breaking ceremonies
for an addition to St. Mary’s
Parochial School were recently
held Oct. 16, 1979 at the
school on East 7th Street in
Rome. James H. Whitney,
General Chairman for the
project introduced Father
Patrick Mulhern, pastor; the
members of St. Mary’s Parish
Council; the Board of
Education, and the Building
Committee to the students of
St. Mary’s and a large number
of guests.
Appreciation for their help
and thanks for the support the
project has received throughout
the community was expressed.
The addition to the school is
being dedicated to the
Daughters of Charity of
Emmetsburg, MD, who have
assigned their sisters to St.
*
‘TftAyi. TtwL
Teresa
Vol. 17 No. 38
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta
Mary’s for the last nine years.
The school principal, Sister
Miriam Troy, turned the first
shovel full of dirt and was then
presented the crome-plated and
engraved shovel that was used
in the ceremony. Sister Miriam
is serving her eighth year as
principal.
The new building will be an
addition to the present school
plant and will be located on the
Southwest side with corridor
that ties into the present
building.
Included in the new addition
will be four new class rooms,
physical education gymnasium,
dressing rooms, showers,
storage facilities and mechanical
room. The gymnasium is
designed to function as a parish
center with all facilities for
handling over 350 people in
general parish functions.
One section of the building
contains a second floor
conference and meeting room
for school and parish use.
The new building has been
designed under the new
environmental and energy
conservation standards for
maximum efficiency of energy
use, and incorporates features
in heating, cooling and lighting
that are new concepts in this
field. Heat that is removed from
the spaces is converted to hot
water and stored for general use
in other parts of the building,
or at night, and is completely
automatic in operation.
The hot water recovery
system is designed for the
connection of future solar assist
equipment in order to make the
building as nearly independent
of energy as possible.
M. G. Turner & Associates
are architects for the building
and Diodati Construction Co. is
the contractor. Work is
expected to start immediately
with completion scheduled in
time for occupancy at the
beginning of the 1980 school
term.
CAMBODIAN PLEDGE - Flanked by Cardinal
Terence Cooke, left, of New York and Father
Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame
University, President Carter pledges S69 million
for starving Cambodians in Thailand and
CAMBODIA
Cambodia. Following the White House meeting
with 40 religious leaders, Father Hesburgh, who is
chairman of the board of the Overseas
Development Council, expressed satisfaction with
the action.
Another Holocaust Forecast
Christian Instruction
Papal Text Subject
It was the
early days of
the Calcutta
experience.
Teresa was only
recently out of
her comfortable
convent and
into her new life
— ' her “call
within a call.” It
took her to the
streets of the
ghettos alone.
There was poverty on those streets,
there was danger in those alleys, but
there was worse, there was terminal
disease spilling over contagiously like
volcanic lava.
The dead she left for the
Sanitation Department. The dying
she took home. Until beds were
filled, she bundled them into every
corner. When the tiny,
unprofessional sanitorium was
saturated, it broke her heart. Her
doors were shut on beseeching
beggers destined to spend another
night alone, perhaps the final night
apportioned to them in this life.
Defensively, Teresa would always
maintain, “We never turned away a
child, never,” and you know she
never did.
This one had been sent to her by
Providence. She had worked to get
him. Tangled up in rubble and death,
she had almost passed him by. But
the eyes - luminous and searching -
had caught her. She struggled to
move his dead companions aside and
without effort she carried the
delicate dying frame home. Now, in
royal fashion, she would fulfill his
final unspoken request.
Mysteriously, from an invisible
fold of her coarse white native sari,
beneath the heavy rosary, she found
what the dying leper wanted. Taking
one unfiltered cigarette from the
pack, she quickly placed it between
his weak quivering lips. The one
grateful puff burned her
unaccustomed eyes as he ex hailed. In
an instant he was gone, released from
unceasing pain, remembering only
the final moments of comfort spent
in the arms of this rugged angel,
vowed to minister only to the
poorest of the poor.
Mother Teresa and her
Missionaries of Charity cannot
aleviate the poverty of India. They
can hardly make a visible dent in the
decay. But that is not their mission.
As they fan out among the wails of
the poor each day, they openly and
deeply plant the Gospel message of
Christ’s charity. And they also fulfill
what Teresa calls the greatest need of
the poor - more than food, medicine
or shelter - the need to be wanted.
You are wanted, you are loved is the
unconquerable message of Mother
Teresa.
Two weeks ago, the most coveted
Nobel honor that this materialistic
society can bestow on human service
was granted to this little, hidden
dynamic giant of Calcutta’s back
streets. The fuss did not change one
stride in her rigorous routine. The
fortune simply went to a need
languishing in pain for a thousand
years. Ohe that will still be there
when Mother Teresa and this
generation has passed away.
It went, with her undying love, to
the poorest of the poor — the lepers
of Calcutta’s gutters.
WASHINGTON (NC) - President
Carter pledged $69 million to help
prevent what he called a possible
holocaust in Cambodia, a country
where famine and war have killed
nearly half of the 8 million people
and threaten almost 3 million more.
Holy Cross Father Theodore
Hesburgh, chairman of the board of
the Overseas Development Council
and president of Notre Dame
University, also spoke of a possible
holocaust at a press conference Oct.
24 before he and other religious
leaders met with Carter to appeal for
aid.
About 40 religious leaders,
including Cardinal Terence Cooke of
New York and Bishop Edwin
Broderick, executive director of
Catholic Relief Services, overseas aid
agency of U.S. Catholics, as well as
Father Hesburgh, asked the president
to provide financial, material and
logistical support to Cambodia.
After the meeting with Carter,
Father Hesburgh expressed
satisfaction with the actions.
Father Hesburgh cited estimates
by the State Department’s refugee
coordinator, Dick Clark, that of
about 8 million Cambodians only
about 4.7 million had survived the
war, executions and starvation of the
past decade. Father Hesburgh said 3
million people are now “in very dire
straits” and “about 200,000 people a
month will die if we don’t get aid
there in a hurry.
“We have in the making another
holocaust — a whole people wiped
out,” he said at the press conference.
Reports from Cambodia show
almost no children under the age of
five and most children suffer from
maleria and other diseases as well as
the effects of hunger. One religious
leader asked that in the Year of the
Child these young Cambodians be
saved “as a symbol of all children.”
Calling the Cambodians “a gentle
people,” Father Hesburgh appealed
to both government and private
sectors for aid, and said he hopes
once the American people realize the
enormity of the problem “they’ll
come through with flying colors.”
The International Committee of
the Red Cross and the United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
have already announced plans to
begin a joint emergency relief
program. The Overseas Development
Council’s leaders proposed to U.N.
General Secretary Kurt Walheim that
U.S. and Soviet forces undertake an
immediate massive airlift of food and
medical supplies.
Of the funds announced by
Carter, $30 million will be the
official U.S. response to an
international appeal for $111 million
made by the Red Cross and UNICEF.
Thailand will receive $9 million for
aid to Cambodian refugees on its
border. Part of the aid was the $30
million authorized by the House
Foreign Affairs Committee for
disaster relief to Cambodia.
Just before Carter’s
announcement Sen. Edward
Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of a
subcommittee on refugees, attacked
the administration ‘for failing to
move quickly enough to deal with
the famine. Reports of the
Cambodian famine had come to light
early this year following an invasion
by Vietnam that ousted the
Chinese-backed Pol Pot regime.
Among the requests the Overseas
Development Council made was that
Carter call on Americans to “give
generously to the private appeals for
funds” and the president did just
that.
“I ask specifically that every
Saturday and Sunday in the month
of November up until Thanksgiving
be set aside as days for Americans in
their synagogues and churches and
otherwise to give generously to help
alleviate this suffering. I am
confident that Americans’ response
will be matched abroad,” Carter said.
Cardinal Cooke emphasized at the
press conference that the aid was
“international and humanitarian —
far above political concerns” in
war-torn Cambodia.
Father Hesburgh said the various
private agencies are working “in
concert, in agreement” to get food to
Cambodian centers and out into the
countryside. “Not just food but farm
equipment, even hoes, are needed,”
he said and new delivery methods
may be made necessary by the lack
of trucks and the condition of roads.
(Continued on page 6)
VATICAN CITY (NC) - In a
major document Pope John Paul II
says catecheties must present
“organic and systematic Christian
instruction.”
The pope also warns against “the
tendency in various quarters to
minimize its importance.” The papal
document was made public Oct. 25.
The church must “offer catechesis
her best resources in people and
energy, without sparing effort, toil or
material means,” says the document.
The document, an apostolic
exhortation addressed “to the
episcopate, the clergy and the
faithful of the entire Catholic
Church,” is titled in Latin “Catechesi
Tradendae.” It has no official English
title. The Latin title means “handing
on the teaching.”
The exhortation was dated Oct.
16. It was released simultaneously in
Latin and major modem languages.
z The document was written in
° response to and on the basis of the
1977 world Synod of Bishops, which
discussed catechesis, especially of the
young.
The document balances
encouragement of new methods and
approaches to catecheties with
repeated insistence that no
methodology or approach can
“endanger integrity of content” or
substitute the personal views of the
catechist for the teachings revealed
through Scripture and developed by
church tradition.
The pope warns against “the
abandonment of serious and orderly
study of the message of Christ in the
name of a method concentrating on
life experience.”
RADIO PRIEST
ROYAL OAK, Mich. (NC) -
Father Charles E. Coughlin, the
“radio priest” of the 1930s who once
had an audience of 40 million
listeners, died Oct. 27 at his home in
a Detroit suburb at the age of 88.
The priest had been bedridden
and in ill health for several weeks.
Father Coughlin built an audience
of millions with his forceful
expositions of a socio-economic
program that was an amalgam of
populism and ideas from papal social
encyclicals. Initially a supporter of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he
turned against Roosevelt’s New Deal
because of what he considered
inadequate monetary policies. A
vigorous anti-communist, the priest
also expressed anti-Semitic views.
Born in Hamilton, Ont., Oct. 25,
1891, to parents of Irish ancestry,
Charles Coughlin studied in parochial
schools and then at St. Michael’s
College in Toronto. Originally
ordained in 1916 as a member of the
Basilian Fathers, he was accepted in
1918 as a priest of the Detroit
Archdiocese and assigned in 1926 to
the small and financially troubled
“Authentic catechesis is always an
orderly and systematic initiation into
the revelation that God has given of
himself to humanity in Christ Jesus,”
the document says.
It mentions approvingly various
special forms of catechesis such as
those related to pilgrimages,
missions, Bible study groups and
other special groups. The main
thrust, however, is a discussion of
systematic catechesis for children,
youths and adults.
This catechesis, the document
says, must be “systematic, not
improvised,” and it must “deal with
essentials” and not be theological
research or discussion of all disputed
questions. It “must nevertheless be
sufficiently complete,” adds the
document, and “must be an integral
Christian initiation open to all the
other factors of Christian life.”
Other major points in the
100-page document include:
— The various creeds, and
especially the “Creed of the People
of God” of Pope Paul VI in 1968
should be used as “a sure point of
reference for the content of
catechesis.”
— The church has a “sacred duty
and an inalienable right” to conduct
its catechesis, even though “the right
is being violated by many states”
even to the point of attaching
criminal penalties to it.
— Varying methodologies for
various cultures, age groups or special
circumstances are valid to the extent
that they are “inspired by the
humble concern to stay closer to a
content that must remain intact.”
(Continued on page 6)
Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal
Oak, Mich.
Searching for ways to help his
parish, he gained the cooperation of
Detroit radio station WJR for
broadcasts of his sermons and taiks
to children. But his interest in
economics and politics and the grave
distress of millions during the
Depression led him further and
further into secular themes. He
attacked Communism, the
administration of President Herbert
Hoover, bankers and speculators in
silver. With the slogan “Roosevelt or
Ruin” in 1932, he backed
Roosevelt’s presidential campaign
and New Deal program.
He formed a League of the Little
Flower and listeners sent in
thousands of contributions weekly,
most in sums no larger than a dollar.
He bought time on an 18-station CBS
hook-up.
Disenchanted with the New Deal,
Father Coughlin in 1934 organized
the National Union for Social
Justice, which had its headquarters at
the Shrine of the Little Flower and
(Continued on page 6) ^
Father Coughlin Dies