In Fields of Thiells...

In Fields of Thiells…
…the raindrops blew and the puddles grew. It rained and poured and sogged and mudded up, but without dampening Salesian spirits as the relic of our Father and Founder came on pilgrimage for the 5,000 members of the Salesian Family including, especially, 2,000 young people (according to the estimates of Fr. Steve Ryan, coordinator of the program).

(Thiells is the hamlet within the Town of Haverstraw where the Marian Shrine and Don Bosco Retreat Center are located, excepting the frontage on Filors Lane in Stony Point.)

Following Don Bosco’s pilgrimage stop in the National Shrine on Sept. 28 (see below), we were pleased to discover in the Washington Post a large photo of the reliquary in the center of the Metro section’s page 1.

On the 29th it was easier to get the reliquary out of the basilica than it had been to get it in; we finished by about 10:00 a.m. At Fr. Steve Shafran’s suggestion, we made an unscheduled stop at Don Bosco Cristo Rey HS, giving at least one class who had missed Don Bosco the previous day a chance to come out to the truck and venerate the relic.

Our caravan got going around 11:00, with Mauro Festa and Tino Luiselli handling the truck and Rudy Gomez and me leading in the car. Most of the way, Rudy was busy with his laptop, editing video from Miami. Without rushing but just keeping up with the traffic on Interstates 95 and 295, we made good time on our way to Haverstraw, stopping only once for gas/diesel and for lunch at a Cracker Barrel right after crossing the Delaware River into New Jersey. At Fort Lee we had to get off the highway, though, and take 9W, which is mostly a local road, the rest of the way up to Haverstraw. Still, we got in before 5:00 p.m. Fr. John Puntino, director of the Marian Shrine, had us “hide” Don Bosco in an out-of-the-way place until the local committee was ready to present him to the public.

At right, chapel of the Marian Shrine

As we arrived, Fr. Steve Ryan and his valiant volunteers were putting the finishing touches on their set-up of a half dozen tent pavilions for Thursday’s youth rally and outdoor Mass in the field next to the Shrine chapel. As Fr. Tom Dunne (our provincial) wrote: “Months of hard work by hundreds of Don Bosco volunteers had transformed the field into a youthful center of faith, food, fun, and fellowship. There were tents for Eucharistic adoration, Penance, formative literature, and religious-themed clothing. The [permanent] pavilion was set up as a food distribution area.”

Mauro, Tino, and Rudy got settled into rooms in the retreat house, and then Mauro, Tino, and joined the SDB community for supper. Rudy wanted to continue his editing work. Following supper, Mauro, Tino, and Fr. John moved the relic up to the Shrine chapel, where there was a formal reception ceremony around 7:30 p.m., followed by a prayer service and youthful fun. I didn’t stay for that, having work still to do back at the provincial house (which kept me up nearly till midnite)—chiefly to download 500 photos from Washington and get them to the folks responsible for posting at donboscoamongus.org and in Sept. 30’s E-Service.

On Thursday, Sept. 30, tropical storm Nicole did its best to put a literal damper on the day, as rain soaked the fields where the tents and stage were set up. The entire student bodies of Don Bosco Prep and Salesian High School and many other young people showed up anyway, no one’s spirits dampened in the least.

A typical morning scene around the casket with Don Bosco's relic at the Marian Shrine
A crew of Salesian Old Boys (see http://sdbnews.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html)–you know what they call themselves—led by Greg Sand manned a booth selling religious articles, books, T-shirts, caps, and other keepsakes. Greg also had a gang of students from Marist College helping out—a hands-on marketing experience. They all seemed to be pretty busy, weather notwithstanding (it was fairly dry under the roof of the tent, after all), and for sure “a good time was had by all.”
Salesian Old Boys Pat Kemple, Jack Hudak, and Tony Smaldone in the merchandise tent.
As Don Bosco had to adapt to circumstances for his “wandering oratory” in 1844-1846, so did the youth rally planners. The relic remained in the chapel, and the music, skits, etc., were moved therein. The pilgrims, both youths and adults, were shuttled (herded?) through in three very large bunches, cramming into every available seat, lining the side aisles and even the back of the sanctuary, sitting on the floor of the center aisle.

The youth program included a skit dramatizing the relationship between Don Bosco and Father/Bishop John Cagliero, acted out by Deacon Mike Leschinsky and Prenovice Kyle Zinno. Don Bosco Prep alum/Georgetown student Ryan Muldoon gave a witness talk about the importance of Don Bosco in his personal spiritual growth. Then two high school students, Kelly Finn from Mary Help of Christians Academy in North Haledon, N.J., and Joe Hadzovic from Brooklyn, gave testimony.

Kelly told how she had transferred into MHCA from another Catholic school as a junior because she wanted to find not only academics but also a passion for God in her school. That she did, and beauty, truth, and joy as well. She called the FMAs “the most beautiful group of women” she has ever met; they live Don Bosco’s message and bring her closer to God every day.
Students from Don Bosco Prep fill the center aisle of the chapel during one of the 3 "youth rallies" before the archbishop arrived.

Joe described how neat it was to find out through Don Bosco’s spirituality that faith and fun can go together. He’s in Kenny Wozanowski’s youth group (Ken used to work in the province youth ministry office) and has made at least one Salesian leadership retreat. He loves the Salesian way to holiness: cheerfulness, the sacraments, Mary, and service; and he wants to help others find that same path. So he’s become a youth leader himself.

Breakfast was served in the pavilion, as planned, and students huddled at the tables under its roof or stood under their umbrellas out in the rain (or even without umbrellas). Others walked up to the gym at the youth center without any definite plan except to try to stay dry.

Fr. Steve and Fr. Tom decided to cancel the Mass that Archbishop Tim Dolan was to have said outside. When the archbishop arrived shortly after 10:30, he graciously and happily agreed to address the young people and other pilgrims in groups in the chapel. So by turn once again, 2,000 or so people were shepherded into the chapel in three groups, and to each the archbishop spoke very warmly about Don Bosco and his message for us today. Having missed the Bosco-Cagliero skit, he called for a “command performance,” and Deacon Mike was hunted up from some corner of the property to do the act one more time with Kyle (who, like a good prenovice, was close at hand).
Abp. Tim Dolan of New York, in front of the reliquary of Don Bosco, speaking to a very crowded chapel about Don Bosco and his message for today.

The archbishop made three points: (1) Don’t be afraid to dream and to follow your dreams. (2) Always put God first in your life. (3) Don Bosco saw good in everyone; don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good. He added that, like Don Bosco, he loves the young very much. That certainly showed in his interaction with the youngsters at the Shrine. For that matter, it shows in his interactions with everyone. Patiently, he posed for photos and conversed with anyone who approached him.

At top, Abp. Dolan with some Don Bosco Prep boys. At bottom, with your sometimes humble blogger.

Later, Fr. Tom reported, the archbishop spoke of the impression made on him by “the joyful spirit of the young people in the midst of the downpour and disappointment.” Abp. Dolan “saw in that amazing spirit of joy in the face of great difficulty a sign of Don Bosco’s spirit of flexibility in serving the needs of the young.”

An unexpected treat was that Abp. Dolan had brought with him his second grade teacher, Sr. Mary Bosco Daly, who way back in 1957 in a St. Louis suburb had turned him into a huge Don Bosco fan. She came from her retirement in Ireland just for Don Bosco. She got a great round of applause, of course.

Abp. Dolan with Sr. Mary Bosco, his 2d grade teacher

After Abp. Dolan left, Fr. Steve Dumais presided over and preached at a Mass for a congregation that crowded the chapel, notwithstanding that by then most of the school kids had had to leave (buses to catch!). Nativity Church’s Gospel choir had extended their Don Bosco pilgrimage from D.C. to N.Y. and provided soulful music for the sacred liturgy, enhancing the experience of many another pilgrim.

Gospel choir from the Church of the Nativity, Washington, D.C.

With the rain mostly over with, although the wind kicked up somewhat, some of the youths who were able to stay—Fr. Steve Ryan’s dedicated crew, among others—managed to start up a game of Frisbee football in the field beyond the tents.

A sizeable delegation of youngsters from Holy Rosary Church in Port Chester got an extensive guided tour of the Shrine grounds from Fr. Rich Alejunas.

Fr. Rich Alejunas with dozens of his youngsters from Port Chester, stopping in front of the replica of Don Bosco's family home in Becchi.

Veneration continued in the chapel all afternoon with a constant flow of pilgrims: young people, old people, families, religious. People came from near and far. A third-hand report tells of a woman who requested a taxi to start her on her way to the airport; she had flown in from Wisconsin to see Don Bosco. People were awed to be in the physical presence of a saint, waiting patiently to get close to the reliquary, to take a picture of the effigy, to offer a long or short silent prayer, to touch the glass casing reverently. Abp. Dolan more emphatically kissed it.

Throughout the day small numbers of people also were celebrating the sacrament of Reconciliation, both out in the tents and in the Shrine chapel. Hundreds of people filled out cards with petitions addressed to the Lord through Don Bosco.

Mom and 4 kids at the petition table

In the evening Korean and Hispanic members of the Salesian Family celebrated prayer services in the chapel, which included music, dance, prayer, and sermon.

With the Shrine chapel nearly full, a youth group performs a gesture-dance to musical accompaniment in honor of Don Bosco.

At the Korean service, which started at 7:30 p.m., Frs. Gus Baek and Dennis Donovan presided over the inauguration of a new, Korean unit of Salesian Cooperators. The first six Cooperators of this new unit made their promises and then were congratulated by all the Cooperators present, some two dozen. The chapel was pretty nearly full for this service, and not just with Koreans and Cooperators.

The first 6 members of the Korean Cooperators unit based in Stony Point make their promises in front of the relic of St. John Bosco.

The Hispanic service was scheduled to begin at 9:00 p.m., after I headed back to New Rochelle.

Homily for 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for
the 28th Sunday of Ordinary TimeOct. 10, 2010
2 Tim 2: 8-13
BSA Adult Leaders
Camp Alpine, N.J.

“Beloved: Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David: such is my gospel, for which I am suffering, even to the point of chains, like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained” (2 Tim 2: 8).

The 1st and 3d readings speak to us of God’s salvation being offered to everyone, regardless of nation or condition. They speak of our gratitude for what God does for us in his goodness. The 1st reading also suggests the cleansing power of Baptism.

All 3 readings this evening allude to faith. The leper Naaman from Syria is healed when he accepts the word of the prophet Elisha and does as he was instructed. The 10 lepers are healed when they come to Jesus begging his help, and do as he instructs them. Paul is chained in prison on account of his preaching the word of God, his being faithful to Christ Jesus, who will keep faith with us and bring us to life.

You may be aware that last Sunday was Respect Life Sunday, and this whole month of October is Respect Life Month. The Gospel is a message of life: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead. If we have died with him, we shall also live with him” (2:8,11).

The Gospel message is countercultural—not only in America or Western Europe but, in different fashions, pretty much everywhere, almost as much in our time as it was in the 1st century, when Christians were officially regarded as criminals and subject to arrest, confiscation of their property, imprisonment, exile, sentencing to labor camps, or execution by torture, wild beasts, fire, beheading. “If we persevere with him, we shall also reign with him. But if we deny him, he will deny us” (2:12) meant something for Paul and the 1st Christians.

When Pope Benedict was in Great Britain last month, he gave a major address to the political and cultural leaders of the U.K. in Westminster Hall. That magnificent old site was a significant choice for an address on the role of religion in public life, delivered to such an audience. It was there that Bp. John Fisher and Sir Thomas More were tried, convicted, and condemned as traitors in 1535 for refusing to yield their religious convictions to the will of the King. Later the Pope visited Tyburn, where hundreds of Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I for the same reason.

While Christians are no longer arrested and convicted as traitors in Western society, they are openly persecuted in Muslim and Hindu countries—anti-Christian riots in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, for example, and laws against any form of public non-Muslim worship in most Arab countries. About a week ago, 12 Filipinos and a Catholic priest “were arrested and charged with ‘proselytizing’ after attending a Catholic Mass at a hotel in Saudi Arabia. They were among 150 expatriate Filipinos reported to have attended a Mass raided by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Arab News says. The 13 were arrested for allegedly organizing and leading the group. The others were released because they could not all be accommodated at the police station.”[1] In China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba believers are subject to harassment, arrest, torture, and long prison sentences.

In the West, instead, Christians face what Pope Benedict calls “the increasing marginal-ization of religion.” Some academic, cultural, and political powers, the Pope says, openly advocate that “the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.” In some countries in Europe and in Canada, a priest or minister, or a religious newspaper, can be prosecuted or sued for preaching or writing that homosexual behavior is immoral.

Abp. Dolan and Abp. Charles Chaput of Denver have spoken out against a powerful bias in the mass media against traditional Christian beliefs. Abp. Chaput said last month: The “new American orthodoxy” favored by prominent and powerful academic, cultural, and political elites

seems to frame which opinions are appropriate [the ones we call "politically correct"] and which ones won’t be heard. And it seems to guide the historical narrative that media present to their audiences. This new thinking seems to presume a society much more secular and much less religious than anything in America’s past or [anything] warranted by present facts, a society where people are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they don’t intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on government, the economy, or culture.”[2]

When the Nobel Prize for Medicine was announced the other morning, someone being interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition made the point—if I heard correctly at that early hour—that in vitro fertilization’s opponents, chiefly the Catholic Church, had already lost that battle and would just as surely lose their battles against other scientific “advances” like embryonic stem cell research.

Which brings us back to the central Gospel message of life. You may remember that a few years ago John Paul II drew a figurative line in the sand between the culture of life and the culture of death, and said that was the main moral issue of our time. Both he and B16 have been following Paul’s advice to Timothy, to “proclaim the word…whether it is in season or out of season” (2 Tim 4:2), in favor or out of favor, convenient or inconvenient, popular or unpopular. (That’s in next Sunday’s 2d reading.) People may not like the message, or they may not like us for preaching it, but “the word of God is not chained,” and in fact the word of God is the word of life, the word that saves us—and not only in terms of eternal salvation, but in terms of building a better society, a society where people are treated decently, with respect.

The culture of life is about more than abortion. The culture of death is making a strong run at society’s general acceptance of euthanasia, which is already legal and practiced in a few countries in Western Europe and in Oregon and Washington State. While one can argue that capital punishment is appropriate in a limited number of cases—even that argument runs against the grain of the Church’s teaching since JPII—the huge number of death sentences imposed in our country should make us ask whether vengeance is more at work than public safety. (This is not even to mention how the death penalty is used in the few other countries that still have it, like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.)

Both JPII and B16 have linked environmentalism, globalization, and the world economy to the culture of life. Seeing that the world’s poor have food, shelter, and education is part of our care for life. Seeing that the earth’s air, water, and other resources can sustain everyone, including future generations, is part of our care for life. Racism, sexism, and ageism are sins against human dignity, ultimately against human life.

Moral issues like in vitro fertilization (IVF), stem cell research, and gay marriage are part of the culture of life vs. the culture of death debate. Since Abp. Dolan has called for a new Catholic apologetics—which doesn’t mean saying “we’re sorry” for what we believe but explaining just what it is that we believe, and why. That’s what St. Justin the Martyr did in mid-2d century for the educated elite of Rome his 1st and 2d Apologies (a wonderful source for us about Christian belief and practice in that period). That’s what Blessed John Henry Newman did in his Apologia pro Vita Sua in mid-19th century, explaining his conversion from the Anglican Church. That’s what that excellent teacher B16 continually advocates when he calls for the use of reason as part of our discussions of faith and life.

So what’s the Church teaching about stem cell research? 1st, there’s no problem at all with using stem cells derived from adult cells: from bone marrow, from placentas, from all sorts of sources. Some terrific research is taking place in these fields, and some of them have been in use with varying degrees of success for a long time, e.g. bone marrow transplants. 2d, research that destroys human life is immoral. That’s the problem with embryonic stem cell research: it destroys human embryos, human beings. They may be the tiniest imaginable human beings, but they’re human.

One of the propaganda tricks of the Nazis was to define the Jews, Gypsies, the mentally retarded, and even the Slavic nations generally, as “subhuman” and therefore of no moral concern. For that matter, many of the defenders of slavery in our own country used the argument that Negroes were not fully human. In the 19th century, nativists held that the Irish immigrants were subhuman and discriminated against them. Just look at Thomas Nast’s political cartoons from the latter part of the century. Once you start to depersonalize people, there are no limits to what you can do to them, and in terms of logic, there’s no limit to whom you can depersonalize.

There’s a powerful editorial in this week’s Catholic New York,[3] following on the aforementioned Nobel Prize in medicine. The editorial’s title is “A Pandora’s Box,” and it says that IVF, the creation of “test-tube babies,” is a “Pandora’s box of ethical and moral issues.”

Thanks to IVF, the market for human eggs is robust, with buyers and sellers making deals for human beings. There are freezers full of embryos that will likely end up used in research as experimental animals destined for destruction, or abandoned and left to die. The prospect of couples ordering up “designer babies” has been introduced…. And the high incidence of multiple pregnancies—triplets, quadruplets and more—from the implantation of multiple embryos in the hope that one will “take” has led to abortions, as mothers seek to reduce the number of babies they’re carrying.
The entire field of embryonic stem-cell research has sprung up as a result of IVF technology, and with it the frightening discipline of human cloning.
Embryos, in other words, have become commodities rather than the sacred human beings that they are.
That’s just the first 3d of the editorial. It also mentions church documents on bioethics that defend the right of every human being to be conceived thru a human act of love and not by an impersonal laboratory procedure. Conception is an aspect of respect for human dignity. It may be counter-intuitive that IVF, which creates human beings, is fundamentally an anti-life procedure: but at root it’s a commodification of human beings. It turns people into market goods, just as slavery did centuries ago. The Catholic Church may be the last hold-out against IVF’s public acceptability, may have “lost” the PR campaign (who reads church documents?), but it will continue to proclaim the dignity of every human being “whether convenient or inconvenient,” as it seeks to be faithful to “Jesus Christ raised from the dead.”

And gay marriage? How’s that a life issue? By nature’s design, homosexual relations are sterile. They ignore one of the 2 vital, necessary, essential characteristics of marriage. Marriage is an exclusive relationship of mutual love, commitment, fidelity, and support. But it is also a relationship ordered toward fertility, toward new life. To exclude deliberately either of these essentials—the mutual love, etc., or openness to new life—is to speak of something other than marriage.

You can have mutual love, commitment, fidelity, and support in many kinds of relationships: parent-child, brother-sister, threesomes (and more), you and your dog. If openness to new life, if sexual complementarity, aren’t considered, why not allow that any sexual relationship—polygamy, polyandry, incest, bestiality—be sanctioned as a loving and committed relationship, and called “marriage”? There’s no logical reason to say no.

Someone will always say, “But what about elderly couples who marry, or a man or woman who is naturally sterile?” There’s no deliberate exclusion of fertility there. Their male-female sexual relationship is open to life, even if, practically speaking, a new life’s unlikely or “impossible.” The relationship itself is life-affirming and not intentionally life-denying.

Gay relationships—and relationships that deliberately exclude the possibility of children, either permanently (marriages that are childless by choice) or temporarily—are inherently life-denying. In other words, relationships involving contraception are life-denying. We can also see now, with hindsight, that the acceptance of contraception in marriage has been the camel’s nose inside the tent, changing our understanding of marriage from one that was always open to the possibility of new life to one in which the couple became the focus of the relationship. If they’re what the relationship is all about—their love, their feelings, their mutual support—then of course any relationship, regardless of gender, can be called “marriage,” and as noted already, you can’t logically confine it to a relationship of 2 only, or of 2 unrelated people.

We can call all of this Church teaching “the Gospel of life,” which is in fact what JPII titled one of his major encyclicals. But if you look at the issues and the reasoning closely, you’ll see that the Church’s teaching doesn’t depend only upon a reading of the Bible or upon a papal encyclical. It depends on science, on reason, on the laws of human nature—what philosophers have for ages called natural law. But we associate it with the teaching of Christ because it’s centered on human beings, people created, we believe, in the image of God and redeemed by Jesus Christ, raised from the dead; people destined for “salvation in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” If we hope to attain that eternal glory in Christ Jesus, then we must hold fast to him and to his teaching, even at the risk of being countercultural, of being stigmatized if not criminalized. Better yet, we have to unchain the word of God, to try to change the culture, to Christianize it by making it more life-affirming.
[1] EWTN News, Oct. 8, 2010: http://ewtnnews.com/new.php?id=1873
[2] CNS news brief, Sept. 28, 2010.
[3] Oct. 7, 2010, p. 9.

Relic of Don Bosco Venerated by 6,500 in Nation's Capital

Relic of Don Bosco

Venerated by 6,500 in Nation’s Capital

As noted in the preamble to the previous post, a relic of Don Bosco has been making its way thru the province in these days. As I write it's in Montreal, having already visited the faithful (Salesian and many others) in New Orleans, St. Pete, Belle Glade, Miami, Washington, New York, and Toronto. At week's end it'll be in Vancouver, concluding its passage thru the province of St. Philip the Apostle.

More on the relic pilgrimage can be found at two sites:

--the province's Web site dedicated to it, http://www.donboscoamongus.org/

--Fr. Steve Leake's blog dedicated to it, http://donboscoamongus.blogspot.com/

While he resided at the provincial house in New Rochelle in the 1990s, the late Archbishop Eugene Marino, SSJ, with his friendly smile would often ask a confrere in the evening, “Did you have a most excellent and triumphant day?”

The entire Salesian Family of the Washington, D.C., area—and thousands of other laity, religious, priests, and bishops—did indeed have a most excellent and triumphant day on Tuesday, Sept. 28.

The casket (or reliquary) containing our Founder’s relic arrived from Miami a little late, due to rain, on the 27th, accompanied by Fr. Bruce Craig and Salesian Domestic Volunteer Rudy Gomez, who has been serving most capably as videographer (see http://www.donboscoamongus.org/) since the relic arrived in our province. (Believe me, there’s a lot of work involved.) The truck and the drivers, Mauro Festa and Tino Luiselli, had already arrived from California and were on hand at Baltimore-Washington International Airport to meet the chartered jet, along with Fr. Steve Shafran, the Washington coordinator for the relic pilgrimage, Bro. Tom Sweeney, Fr. George Hanna, and this reporter.

The first of many reporters met us at the airport and interviewed Fr. Steve while we were waiting. He’d organized everything very well, and the delivery went smoothly. When we got to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the construction crew was waiting for us with their elaborate rig of scaffolding, chains, and pulleys to winch the 1,200-pounds of casket and carriage up the long flight of steps at the west entrance, whence it was an easy roll into the basilica itself. There was also a bevy of reporters from the local media, both secular and religious (e.g., see http://www.cathstan.org/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=4141&SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&S=1).


Some clarifications of fact: Yes, the casket and carriage are 1,200 pounds. The original, heavier carriage was replaced for easier handling. The effigy of Don Bosco within the glass-and-metal casket is made of fiberglass, not wax. The original 1929 effigy at his altar in Turin was wax. That was replaced with a fiberglass one when the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians was renovated a few years ago, when also the image now traveling the world was created. And Don Bosco’s body in his tomb in Turin is not incorrupt.

Here’s more, reported by ANS (4/17/09): “The base of the casket is in the form of a bridge supported by four pillars which bear the dates of the bicentennial: 1815-2015. They are decorated on the ends of the casket with square tiles with the faces of young people from the six continents made by sculptor Gabriele Garbolino. The coat of arms of the Salesian Congregation, … the charismatic motto adopted by Don Bosco himself—Da mihi animas, cetera tolle—completes the decoration of the case. Including the base, the casket is 101 inches long, 62.5 inches wide and 53 inches high with a total weight of more than 200 pounds.” Evidently, most of the weight is in the carriage, not the casket. Of course, the effigy weighs something too.


A small contingent from Don Bosco Cristo Rey, along with some basilica staff, was there to greet Don Bosco’s relic and escort it to its overnight place off the narthex, where they venerated it. These students were those who would serve Mass on the 28th, plus a few who had to work that day and thus wouldn’t be able to take place in the rite of reception with the rest of the school.

On the 28th we had gray skies most of the day, but at least it didn’t rain. All the students of DBCR who weren’t at their jobs arrived between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m., along with some parishioners from Nativity. Many students and parishioners took turns during the day serving as greeters and ushers. Some elementary school children also came for the celebration, including a contingent from Our Lady of Victory School in D.C.

Auxiliary Bishop Martin Holley of Washington presided over the rite of reception, starting at 8:30 in the narthex, and including a procession up the center aisle and a liturgy of the word in the sanctuary. The reliquary of Don Bosco on its carriage was positioned at the main crossing of the basilica, under the central dome.

In his homily Bp. Holley made the point that Don Bosco helped young people to see the dignity of every person, and it’s our task to imitate his example, as he was imitating Jesus Christ.

During the service a student from DBCR noted that we venerate Don Bosco’s relic as a sign of the man who was himself a sign and bearer of God’s love for the young. Don Bosco modeled himself on Jesus the Good Shepherd, giving his time, energy, and very self to the young so that they might follow Christ. Nothing was more important to Don Bosco than helping the young along the road toward salvation. So the students are happy to celebrate Don Bosco among them every day, as he intercedes for them.

After the service, I asked a group of juniors and seniors from DBCR why Don Bosco was important to them. They told me that he’s their founding father who was so generous in helping youth—and there would be no Salesians without him. He teaches us about loving and helping others.

Some of these students have already had a chance to practice that love and help. They’ve taken part in two Gospel Roads programs, one in D.C. and one at Haverstraw-Stony Point. They said that Gospel Roads made them feel good because they were helping others, and they thought they were starting a chain of goodness—others would see their example and want to imitate it. They also saw that people in need aren’t different from themselves, and that people in need deserve help and respect. One senior girl observed that sleeping outside (at the retreat house) made her understand a little bit what homeless people have to do.

The students were thrilled at the opportunity to “see Don Bosco” so close up.

During the day, almost 4,400 people came to venerate the relic, according to Shrine staff. Many had, indeed, come to the National Shrine just for that purpose, having heard about the pilgrimage-visit on TV (local news or EWTN), through their diocesan papers, or through signs plastered on D.C. buses. Others were visitors, including school groups, who just happened to come to the Shrine that day. Some had come from a good distance; others were as close as the Catholic University of America, right outside the basilica’s doors. One school group, St. John the Baptist in Silver Spring, is one of DBCR’s sending schools.


I met one mother with five young children. They’d come from Hershey, Pa., after reading about the relic in their diocesan paper. They told me that they’d even left Hershey Park early on Sunday, the last day of the season, in order to get home and watch Fr. Groeschel and “two Salesians” talk about the relic. I asked why Don Bosco was important to them, and the oldest, a girl who looked to be 12 or 13, answered, “Because he became the parent of so many boys at one time. And he still became a saint!” (I think the fact that she has three younger brothers might have influenced her response.)

The highlight of the pilgrimage stop in Washington was certainly the Eucharistic liturgy at 6:30 p.m. No one attempted a count of the congregation, but it seemed to me that about three-fourths of the seats were occupied during most of the service. The basilica seats 2,600, we were told. So put the Mass attendance at about 2,000. The congregation included pilgrims of the archdiocese of Washington and the diocese of Arlington, representatives of the Latino, Black, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, and African communities, Salesian Family members, especially the Youth Apostles, the Don Bosco Filipino Alumni Association, the Christian Embassy, and a smattering of DBCR students and their families.

Archbishop Donald Wuerl presided at Mass. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the apostolic nuncio to the U.S.; Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Va.; and Auxiliary Bishops Martin Holley and Barry Knestout of Washington concelebrated, along with about 30 priests—our own confreres, priests of the archdiocese, religious, and university personnel.


After the Mass there was abundant praise for the archbishop’s homily, which I summarize from my notes:

Relics are visible signs of the continuing presence of the saints in our lives.

Today we celebrate St. John Bosco, the patron of youth, of Catholic educators, of those who care for others. We celebrate how one man answered God’s call to look after poor young people who otherwise would have no chance. He responded generously to that call.

The story of the Salesian Society shows the hand of God’s providence for the young. In his night school Don Bosco offered to them the possibility of a full, real, rich life. Education is the key to the future for young people.

To understand the explosion of the Salesian Society throughout the world, we turn to tonight’s gospel (Matt 18: 1-6, 10). It speaks of the innocence of children seeking entry to the kingdom of God. What Don Bosco and every Salesian sees is the future, the possibility of their entering the kingdom of God.
Everyone here honoring this relic recognizes that Don Bosco was truly a master catechist. That mastery flowed from his communion with God. He was a man recognized as holy in his own time.

Jesus came into the world to testify to the truth. Today that mission continues in all who teach in his name. The Salesians have embraced this command of the Lord. Right here at Catholic University, Pope Benedict XVI said that education is integral to the mission of the Church. Those who hear the message of Jesus and accept it are welcomed into the kingdom of God.

Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School and Nativity Parish are living testimonies to the heritage of Don Bosco living today in our midst. Don Bosco would find himself at home in either of these communities. In the classrooms of DBCR, in the faces of those students, he’d see exactly what he saw in his own days—lively faith, living love, youngsters embraced by the Salesians.

That’s why so many thousands of people look to the relics of Don Bosco as a sign of God’s love for them.

Don Bosco took seriously Christ’s challenge: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.” And so do the Salesians.

[For the Washington Archdiocese's Catholic Standard newspaper's coverage of the Mass and the archbishop's homily, see http://www.cathstan.org/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=27&ArticleID=4159 ]

At the end of Mass, Fr. Shafran thanked all present “from our hearts for your presence with us today and this great outpouring of love and veneration of our Founder, the Father and Teacher of Youth, especially those most vulnerable, poor, and abandoned.”

In a mini-homily of his own, he called the saints examples for our lives: “The saints mirror the life of Jesus in real and practical ways for us. They show us in their weakness, in their great love and their powerful examples that we, all of us and all young people, [can] reach holiness and are called to be the leaven of Jesus in the world today. The pilgrimage of the relics of St. John Bosco provides a window for us to the Kingdom that is our inheritance and our goal.”

Fr. Shafran also linked Don Bosco to two Popes who in turn are linked to the U.S. and the National Shrine. Pope Pius IX gave Don Bosco “permission to begin our Society, approved our first Constitutions, and granted permission for the first departure of Salesian missionaries to South America, which started the growth of our Congregation, which today is the second largest order of consecrated men in the Catholic Church.”

Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, eight years after the American bishops chose her under that title to be patroness of the United States.

When Canon Joseph Sarto, the future St. Pius X, visited Don Bosco’s Oratory in the 1875, Don Bosco “shared his views on educating the young, frequent communion and confession, and his great devotion to Mary. Canon Sarto enrolled as a Salesian Cooperator … and is the first Salesian Cooperator canonized a saint! Later as Pope Pius X he began the process of canonization for Don Bosco and introduced that of Don Bosco’s student Dominic Savio. Pope Pius X is known as the Pope of the Blessed Sacrament.” Pius X approved the proposal to build the National Shrine.

“What a grace it is,” said Fr. Shafran, “for Don Bosco to be in this basilica today – dedicated to Mary, whom he considered the foundress of our Society and all of the ministry of the Salesians of Don Bosco in the world.”

He concluded by presenting to Abp. Wuerl, the other prelates, and the rector of the Shrine, with large portraits of St. John Bosco in “heartfelt gratitude” for their presence and their superb cooperation in the visit of Don Bosco’s relic.

Music for the Mass was provided by the choir of our Nativity Church. They were outstanding! (No surprise in that.) At the end of Mass, the archbishop went out of his way to thank them.


On the morning of Sept. 29, the casket with Don Bosco’s relic and its carriage were removed from the basilica in the same way that they’d been brought in and were loaded into the truck for a six-hour ride to the Marian Shrine. Before that ride really got underway, the relic made an unscheduled stop at DBCR, where one class, at least, who had missed the pilgrimage while at work the previous day had the opportunity to come out and pay their respects to their “father and founder.”

Homily for 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time
To anyone who may have been looking for this 2 weeks ago--sorry! It's been a crazy time in the province with a relic of St. John Bosco passing thru on pilgrimage, including my duties with regard to that. Extensive coverage at http://www.donboscoamongus.org/ which does include a lot of photos taken by yours truly in Washington, the Marian Shrine, and St. Patrick's Cathedral, as well as video, photos, and news links from the other places of pilgrimage.

Sept. 26, 2010
1 Tim 6: 11-16
Christian Brothers, Iona College, N.R.

“But you, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness” (1 Tim 6: 11).

On my 1st look at this Sunday’s readings, I noticed (obviously) their condemnation of the rich who ignore the collapse of their society and ignore the poor. Perhaps not the most fertile soil for developing a homily here.

2d, I noticed the lines in Amos about “lying upon beds of ivory, stretched comfortably on their couches,” eating “lambs taken from the flock and calves from the stall” (6:4), and found a justification for camping trips.

Finally, I noticed Paul’s exhortation to Timothy, his young disciple to whom pastoral care of the church at Ephesus has been given. Ironically, in the context of our 1st and 3d readings, this exhortation from 1 Timothy 6 is sandwiched between passages warning about the dangers of riches (“the love of money is the root of all evils”—6:10) and urging the wealthy to do good with their riches so as to accumulate “treasure for the future so as to win the life that is true life” (6:19).

Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are called the “pastoral” letters of the NT because of their concern for how the Church’s leaders, her pastors, conduct themselves and how they govern their flocks. Today Paul advises Timothy not so much as a bishop as as a disciple, a professed believer in Christ Jesus. He addresses him as “man of God,” άνθρωπε Θεοϋ—a human being belonging to God (6:11). He reminds him that he has “been called to eternal life” by the fact of having “made the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses” (6:12). A few commentators take this to refer to an ordination rite, but most see in it a reference to Baptism.

In Baptism the follower of Christ makes a profession of faith, a “noble confession,” and starts on the road “to eternal life.” In Baptism the follower of Christ is sacramentally united with Christ and the “testimony he gave under Pontius Pilate for the noble confession” (6:13). Christ’s testimony is his μαρτυρία, his bearing witness, which many Christians in the 1st century were called upon to do in public trials and in firm refusal to honor any God except the one “King of Kings and Lord of Lords who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, and whom no human being has seen or can see” (6:15-16)—“to keep the commandment without stain or reproach” (6:14), the commandment that there is no God but the Lord, and we are to love him with our whole heart and soul (cf. Mark 12:28-33).

In the 1st century, these were no idle words. This is no idle exhortation. Nor is it in our century, as Pope Benedict reminded us forcefully during his recent trip to Great Britain, especially in his speech to the cultural and political leaders of the nation on the role of religion in public life—given in the very spot where Thomas More was convicted of treason and condemned to death for refusing to yield religious authority to the State, refusing, in 1st-century terminology, to burn incense before the emperor.

St. Thomas More: window of a church in Surrey, England

Today’s Christian, whether professed religious or ordained minister or “only” baptized anthropos Theou, still has to “lay hold of eternal life,” i.e., to determine that his objective in this life is to win eternal life thru his identification with Christ Jesus, and to pursue the objective relentlessly, despite any efforts by the Pontius Pilates of the world to turn him off the right road. For surely our Lord Jesus Christ is going to appear again in God’s good time (6:14-15) to separate the faithful from the unfaithful, those who’ve “kept the commandment without stain or reproach” from those who haven’t.

The 1st verse of this evening’s passage lists 6 virtues that Timothy, the man of God, should pursue (6:11). Being “righteous” and “devout” and “faithful” refers to our relationship with God. In Baptism God has made us “righteous” thru our association with Jesus Christ, and as the baptismal rite reminds us, we are charged to bring our baptismal garment with us unstained when we go to meet Christ. Certainly our devotion, our union with God in prayer, our imitation of the good works of Jesus, helps us to live lives without stain or reproach; and our sacramental life, which is the life of Christ himself, restores us to divine righteousness if we should fail.

“Love, patience, and gentleness” are virtues that we practice with others in our imitation of Jesus. They are the practical ways in which we “compete well for the faith” (6:12), engage in the daily combat of life against our own egos, against the allurements of the present world, against Satan and all his empty promises.

The Vietnamese martyrs: National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington
The passage concludes with a short doxology: “To him be honor and eternal power” (6:16). If we live as Paul exhorts us to, we honor God. If we live as he exhorts us to, we not only acknowledge the power of God but we also demonstrate it: for it takes a lot of power to be faithful to God in the face of all life’s temptations and discouragements, power that is not our own. It takes a lot of power to defeat sin and to raise the dead. But to this we have been called, to receive the gifts of forgiveness and eternal life.

Homily for 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
25th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Sept. 19, 2010
Amos 8: 4-7
Luke 16: 1-13
St. Vincent’s Hospital, Harrison, N.Y.

“The Lord has sworn…: ‘Never will I forget a thing they have done!’” (Amos 8: 7).

Last nite, after having composed the homily, I came upon a blog post* that seems to me very apropos, and so I’m inserting it here:

What do you put before God?Ask yourself that question after reading this item about Ramadan and Muslim NFL star Husain Abdullah…:

NFL practices this time of year are designed for maximum sweat production. Coaches are trying to build up stamina and endurance. Players push themselves to the limit, in pursuit of jobs and starting spots. It's also really, really hot.

And starting on Aug. 11, the beginning of the Islamic month of Ramadan, Minnesota Vikings safety Husain Abdullah will be going through these practices without the benefit of water. Or food. Or any other kind of hydration.

During Ramadan, observing Muslims like Abdullah will fast for 30 days; eating or drinking nothing while the sun is out. Food and drink are permitted after dark and before sunrise, but during the day, there's nada -- not a tiny little sip of water, or the smallest release of Powerade's mystic mountain blueberry.

From the AP:

Even while sprinting in the heat and humidity during drills, sometimes in full pads, Abdullah is adamant about his faith. He will not allow himself so much as a cup of water until the sun sets and before it rises.

"I'm putting nothing before God, nothing before my religion," Abdullah said. "This is something I choose to do, not something I have to do. So I'm always going to fast."

How many of us live our faith that fiercely? How often do we stumble during Lent, when giving up a candy bar during the week or a Big Mac on Friday qualifies in our feeble minds as Heroic Sacrifice? How many of us throw a pillow at the alarm clock and roll over on Sunday morning instead of going to mass?

"I put nothing before God, nothing before my religion..."

Wouldn't you like to be able to say that, and mean it?
Last week, you may remember, the Lord got really angry at the Israelites because they had created an idol—the golden calf—and worshipped it, crediting it with leading them out of Egypt and setting them free.

This week, it’s several hundred years later, and God’s angry with them again. But the reason’s slightly different. This time they’re worshipping money, which causes them to hold the sabbath and other sacred days in low regard—“When will the new moon be over, that we may sell our grain, and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat?” (Amos 8:5); and to hold the poor in low regard, cheating them in the market and forcing them to sell themselves into slavery just to have food and clothing—“We buy the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals” (8:6).

Last week God was angry with Israel because they’d broken their covenant with him, that he would be their God and they’d be faithful to him. This week they’ve broken covenant with him in 2 ways: the infidelity of not caring about the sabbath, and the infidelity of oppressing others who are part of the covenant, their fellow Israelites.

The prophet Amos repeatedly tells Israel that they’ll meet disaster if they don’t return to the Lord—not only in what’s openly religious, like worshipping only the Lord and observing the sabbath, but also in their care for the neediest and most helpless members of their society. Our obligations to God exceed what goes on within the church walls. Our relationship with him includes our relationship with everyone else—not only our fellow Christians, not only our fellow Americans, but everyone, because God’s love extends to everyone, as St. Paul says in our 2d reading: “God wills that everyone be saved and come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).

We could say something about what the rich and the powerful have done to our country—the economic disaster of our public policies. More to the point for us, tho, is God’s call to us to put our relationship with him and with his people in the first place: “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Luke 16:13). Mammon means any created good or activity that might come between us and God: money, drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, power—anything that we might get addicted to, anything that might supplant God in our lives. “I put nothing before God, nothing before my religion.”

Are there people in our lives whom we disregard, look down on, cheat, trample upon and destroy (cf. Amos 8:4)?—the sorts of behavior denounced by Amos, the sorts of behavior that destroy society when repeated over and over by tens of thousands of individuals like you and me. Have we sold out spouses or families in order to pursue some selfish interest of our own? How do we treat our co-workers, or employees if we have a business?

All of us, of course, sin, and all of us sin against our brothers and sisters in some fashion. Paul reminds us, as always, of the Good News of Jesus Christ: “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as ransom for all,” because God wants “everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth”—the truth of his love and pardon offered us thru Jesus, the truth that Jesus can transform us into images of himself if we allow him, if we make a firm decision to do something about where we are and where we want to wind up (like the steward getting fired in Jesus’ parable today—Luke 16:1-8).

Where do we want to wind up? Jesus mentions “eternal dwellings” (16:9). That’s our ultimate goal, of course—those heavenly mansions beyond the pearly gates. (Yes, heaven’s a gated community, and you can’t get in unless you know Someone inside!) Even here below we want happy relationships in our families, in our workplaces, where we shop and look for entertainment. We want a society where people—including the poor, the immigrant, the elderly, the disabled—are treated with respect and dignity, not cheated, not bought and sold like commodities, not used and discarded like merchandise. Then we have to decide how we’ll act with our families, co-workers, store clerks, other drivers on the roads; decide what kind of public leaders we want to elect.

“The master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently” (Luke 16:8) in regard to where he stood and where he wanted to wind up. Each of us has to act similarly.

* Greg Kandra, The Deacon’s Bench, Sept. 18, 2010, crediting blogger Scott Dodge.

Troop Forty Remembers

Troop Forty Remembers

The city of Mt. Vernon last Saturday, 9/11/10, commemorated 5 citizens who perished from this earth 9 years earlier.

Troop Forty, whose Scoutmaster Michael A. Boccardi, 30, was 1 of those 5, took part in the commemoration at city hall. The timing of the ceremony, which started a little after 8:30 a.m., presumably was meant to coincide with the 1st strike on the World Trade Center, which we think killed our friend, who worked on the 92d floor of the north tower.

The early hour was a sacrifice for these teens. We're proud that most of the Scouts were willing to make it, as were many of their parents.

When relatives of the deceased came up to light candles and place them at the city's 9/11 monument, one of the senior Scouts represented the Boccardi family and the troop. Life Scout Tylar Rodriguez was a Cub Scout when Mr. Boccardi ran the troop.

9/11/01 was just days before Troop Forty was going to have its 1st meeting of the new school year. That meeting was held, but it turned into a memorial service for our missing Scoutmaster. One Scouter wrote to me on 9/12:

Padre,

There is no way I can begin to express my sorrow and frustration over what has happened to my best friend. I am finding it very difficult to cope with this. I have been in constant touch with our circle of Troop 40 people. There is no good news.

Mike has always been there for me. He spoke to me almost on a daily basis. I would often get a cell phone call just to share some simple moment. I try to hold out some ray of hope, but so far there is little to raise my hopes.

I know that God is with us, but I can’t help wondering why this was allowed to happen. I hope to see you soon.

I don’t have all details of Friday’s meeting except that we will all be there, probably at the gym.

Here's the obituary that ran in the Journal News on Oct. 11, 2001:

BOCCARDI, MICHAEL ANDREW

Michael Andrew Boccardi, 30, of Bronxville, missing since the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center tragedy, will be remembered at a special Memorial Mass on Sunday, October 14, at 2:30 p.m. at St. Ursula’s Church, Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon. Family, friends and community are welcomed and invited to attend the services to express their love.

Michael touched the lives of many people and will forever remain in the hearts of those who knew him, especially his parents, Michael R. Boccardi and Carol A. Boccardi; his sister Michelle and her husband Todd Bronson; his goddaughter and niece Taylor Rose; and his grandmother, Rose Boccardi.

Michael attended Mount Vernon High School, where he excelled, earning a full scholarship to Cooper Union School of Engineering, having achieved a perfect score on the math section of the SAT. His teachers remembered him as a gentleman who was on top of his academics and one of the most superb students they ever had the honor, pleasure and privilege to have taught.

Being a Eagle Scout was important to Michael since it was always his desire to influence young men to understand, practice and accept the true meaning of what it meant to be a Boy Scout. This represented true American ideals to him and he remained committed to his beliefs, serving as scoutmaster to Troop 40 and assistant cubmaster to Pack 40.

His fine character, intelligence and continued devotion to Scouting open doors for him at Fred Alger Management, Inc., where an officer of this company who watched him grow up, offered him a job. Michael rose to the position of senior vice president of institutional relations.

His determination to influence the lives of young adults continued in the form of dedication to his church. He also became a detective with Rockland County Child Protective Services, unselfishly serving others and his community. He always graciously found time for his family and friends no matter what time of day it would be.

Michael’s legacy will live on...for he walked quietly and left his footprints etched indelibly upon the hearts of all who had the pleasure to know him.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the MICHAEL BOCCARDI TRUST, c/o Joseph Goubeaud, Esq., 22 West First Street, Suite 502, Mount Vernon, NY 10550, which will be used for the benefit of the Boy Scouts.

May our beloved friend, and all who were slain so cruelly that day, rest in the Lord's peace. May the Lord turn the hearts of the cruel to repentance.

Writing = Hard Work

Writing = Hard Work

Who knew?

Well, besides students trying honestly to write term papers.

And reporters, homilists, and others writing on deadline.

And serious writers not on deadline simply trying to get that first sentence composed just right as they stare at their computers (or blank sheets of paper--yes, there are still some of those around)...and then the whole first paragraph....

St. John Bosco is the patron saint of editors.

A recent op-ed in the NYT by no less successful a writer than novelist John Grisham broadcasts, about his first book (which didn't sell, he says): "I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort. It was more difficult than laying asphalt [which he'd done as a youth], and at times more frustrating than selling underwear [ditto]. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had--but it's worth it."
The full essay, "Boxers, Briefs and Books," is at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/opinion/06Grisham.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=john%20grisham&st=cse

Abp. Wuerl Blesses Don Bosco Cristo Rey HS Expansion

Abp. Wuerl

Blesses Expansion

at Don Bosco Cristo Rey HS
Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, D.C., came to Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School (DBCR) in Takoma Park, Md., on Tuesday morning, Sept. 7, to celebrate the Mass of the Holy Spirit at the opening of the new school year and to help the school celebrate its growth as shown in a new addition to its building. The Mass was celebrated in Our Lady of Sorrows Church, next door to the school.

DBCR is co-owned by the Salesians and the archdiocese of Washington, governed by a board of directors representing the SDBs, the archdiocese, and members of the wider community, and administered by the SDBs. The school is starting its fourth year of operation; so this is its first year with a full complement of freshmen (87), sophomores (63), juniors (65), and seniors (72)—287 boys and girls in all. The staff includes 4 full-time SDBs and 45 lay teachers, administrators, and support personnel.

Don Bosco Cristo Rey is part of the national Cristo Rey Network. Last year, there were 24 Cristo Rey schools nationwide preparing low-income students to enter college.

The Eucharistic celebration took place on the second full day of school; orientation and the first day of class were Aug. 30-Sept. 3.

The students participated enthusiastically in the Mass of the Holy Spirit, attended also by some of their parents, board members, corporate sponsors, and benefactors of the school. Fr. Raymond Wadas, pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows Church; Msgr. John Enzler, vicar of development for the archdiocese; Fr. Steve Shafran, president of DBCR; Fr. George Hanna, SDB, director of the SDB community and pastor of Nativity Church in Washington; and Fr. Dominic DeBlase, SDB, of Nativity Church concelebrated with Abp. Wuerl.
A student choir and student musicians under the direction of Fr. Abe Feliciano, director of faith formation at DBCR, provided the music. As is usual at Salesian celebrations with young people, the most rousing hymn was the recessional, “Friend of the Young and the Poor,” which Fr. Steve Schenck composed in 1998 to help celebrate the centennial of our New Rochelle Province.

Immediately following the 8:00 a.m. Mass, Abp. Wuerl blessed the addition to the school building, which houses administrative and guidance offices and a library, as well as a new main entrance. Together with benefactors, staff members, and students, he cut ribbons at four key points in the building: the front door, the entrance of the main office, the central hallway between the new offices and some of the old classrooms, and the library. One academic class was positioned at each ribbon-cutting station.

Everyone poses before cutting the ribbon at the school's new entrance: Msgr. John Enzler, Maureen and Beth Hendricks, a senior student, Abp. Wuerl, another senior, Fr. Steve Shafran, and a board member.

In his welcome of Abp. Wuerl and the other guests at the start of Mass, Fr. Shafran noted the significance of the prayerful gathering: a new class just started school; the school has its first senior class; there’s a new building; and both school and students are taking another step in their lives.

The archbishop began his homily by saying that the Mass indicated a triumph for DBCR after a touch-and-go beginning five and six years ago, when getting the school organized, financed, and off the ground was a huge question mark. Abp. Wuerl proudly noted its growth as seen in a class of seniors, a new freshman class, and a new building.

But the core of his homily tackled the questions, “What does the Church bring to young people? What does DBCR offer them?” He suggested three answers: (1) an academically excellent education; (2) a context of moral values for focusing and guiding lives; (3) intangible opportunities to grow in self-confidence, respect for others, and hope for the future.

DBCR, said the archbishop, helps students answer the question, “How shall I live?” It assures them that God will be with them in their lives, that they are part of his family. It encourages them so to live in our demanding, highly technological world that they will make the world a better place by being all that God asks them to be. In seeking answers to the question of how to live and in meeting life’s challenges, they are assured of the presence of the Holy Spirit whom they invoked in this Mass, with his gifts of courage, fortitude, etc.

Abp. Wuerl’s homily echoed part of the DBCR mission statement: “…our mission is to provide a rigorous educational program of academics and corporate work-study that will prepare our graduates for college with the Christian values essential to a successful and fulfilling life.”

Just before the final dismissal of the Eucharistic liturgy, Fr. Shafran expressed thanks: to Christ, to Mary Help of Christians (who, he said, has already worked miracles in DBCR’s students), and to those who planned, built, and furnished the new building. He singled out the John and Maureen Hendricks Charitable Foundation, and the school made a presentation in appreciation to Maureen and Beth Hendricks, who were present.

Students also presented token gifts such as a DBCR baseball cap to Abp. Wuerl, and the archbishop presented to the school a plaque depicting Jesus announcing the Good News of God’s kingdom.
As part of the ritual blessing at the entrance of the school, the archbishop prayed that the Word of God would always echo in the school, since that Word is truth, which is the goal of all learning.
Outside the DBCR entrance the archbishop made a few remarks and offered a blessing prayer.

After the blessing and the four ribbon-cuttings, there was a reception in the cafeteria, offering pastries, coffee, milk, and juice to guests and students. Then several senior students took any guests who wished on guided tours of the school, including a few students from St. Augustine School in the District. Parents and board members praised the quality of the tours.

Catholic schools (both parochial and private) supplied 39% of the new ninth graders. Another 49% come from regular public schools, and the balance from charter schools. 39% of last year’s enrolled students were District residents; the rest were from suburban Maryland. In the new freshman class, only 22% are from the District.

No one had precise figures at hand, but Fr. Feliciano estimates that about 55% of the student body are Catholic. All the students take theology courses and attend Catholic religious services. The non-Catholics know that’s a requirement and show interest in learning about a different faith, says Bro. Tom Sweeney of the theology department.

All the students belong to minority groups. The majority are Hispanic (53% last year, 62% of the new freshmen), 1% Asian, and the rest blacks (some African-Americans, some whose families have come recently from the Caribbean or Africa).

Abp. Wuerl stops to greet seniors outside DBCR.

More of the students are female (53% last year, 54% of freshmen this year) than male.

The school recruits students in many ways that would be familiar to any Catholic high school: visits to nearby Catholic and public schools, presentations at high school fairs and to elementary school guidance counselors, tours of the school, and “shadow” opportunities for prospective individual students. In addition, DBCR uses the Latino Student Fund and other community organizations to identify likely students.

The primary eligibility criterion for a prospective student is poverty, says Fr. Shafran. As the DBCR mission statement puts it, “Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School provides a college-preparatory program for highly motivated young men and women with limited financial opportunities.” Locally, the federally determined poverty level is an annual income of $35,000 or less for a family of four. Almost three-fourths of DBCR students (72%) live in one-parent families, and 75% qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.

Running DBCR is costly, of course. Fr. Shafran says it costs $13,400 per student per year. The corporate work study program supplies $7,500 of that. The nominal tuition (or “parental responsibility,” as the school calls it) is $2,500, but relatively few families actually pay that much. All pay something; the amount is negotiated individually according to ability to pay, for which DBCR uses the Private School Aid Service.

The original DBCR buildings--the gym is at right--were the parochial school of Our Lady of Sorrows. The new addition fronting on Larch Ave. is at left.
The SDBs have granted the school $200,000 a year for five years; next year that grant will conclude. The balance of needed funding comes from $180,000 in need-based scholarship money from the archdiocese and from various types of fundraising, which keeps Fr. Shafran and the development office personnel quite busy—to the tune of a million dollars annually to fund the operational budget. (In addition, there’s a loan from the archdiocese to be repaid.) Fr. Shafran has found Msgr. Enzler “phenomenal” in his willingness to help the school and in the contacts that he provides.

The corporate work study program is the core of DBCR’s funding as well as one of the vital components of its educational offerings. The number of corporate sponsors—companies that offer salaried jobs to DBCR students—and thus the amount of funding available to pay for student tuitions in large part determines the number of students who can be accepted into each freshman class. Last year the economy had a severe impact on local companies’ capacity to offer jobs, and the school suffered accordingly—and could take in fewer freshmen (this year’s sophomores) than desired. According to Fr. Shafran, the ideal student body would number 450-500, meaning that 100-125 corporate sponsors would be needed, along with “parental responsibility,” to cover operating expenses.

Fr. Steve Shafran, president of DBCR

Of course a larger enrollment will also mean more building has to be done. On these first two days of school (Sept. 3 and 7), the only ones in which all the students were in class instead of a fourth of them being at their corporate jobs, it was a scramble to juggle schedules to find space for all 287 of them from one period to another.

One of the challenges for the DBCR staff is that so many of the entering students come with poor academic and personal skills. To prepare 13- and 14-year-olds to enter the work force, each freshman class goes through three weeks of “boot camp” in August. They’re taught basic job skills like how to interview, dress, use business machines (fax, computer, copier), file documents, answer the telephone, address people professionally, give a handshake, make eye contact. They learn the rules that govern work permits for minors, learn about confidentiality, and learn how to use the Metro, which is how most of them will get to and from their work places.

Most of the students are highly appreciated at their jobs. But sometimes there are problems, and a student may be terminated, e.g., for not focusing sufficiently on his or her work or not complying with company rules. Then the school has to replace the student with another—there’s a contractual obligation to fill the job—and to retrain the “failing” student and place him or her in another position as soon as possible.

Three full-time staff members work at finding corporate sponsors, placing the students, and following them up. Bro. Sweeney assists them, in addition to teaching four theology classes. Fortunately, the economic climate is improving, and sponsors are easier to find this year—68 companies are presently enlisted. These include schools and colleges, hospitals, law firms, accountants, construction companies, Catholic Charities, the U.S. Department of Education, and more.

In school there are challenges concerned with behavior and academic performance. The family and neighborhood environments from which the students come have a dramatic effect on performance, according to Bro. Sweeney and Elias Blanco, an assistant to the principal. Some have been pushed prematurely into adult roles in the family; many have low self-esteem or low self-confidence; many have difficulty focusing on the task at hand. Naturally, many of them have the sorts of priorities often found in teens, like friends, recreation, and consumer goods.

To address academic issues, student volunteers come in twice a week from Georgetown University to offer tutoring. There’s a double benefit to that, says Ann Kerrigan of the corporate work study staff: 1st, the DBCR kids get help learning subject matter; 2nd, they interact with college students who become role models for them.

Various staff members cite the visible growth in students—personal and religious—as the great reward of working at DBCR. The seniors have become self-confident and appropriately mature young women and men. They’re taking on leadership roles in the school. They, and even more so the juniors, are looking toward higher education after DBCR—something that wasn’t in their wildest dreams while they were in elementary or middle school. Perhaps all this constitutes the “miracles” that Fr. Shafran credits to Mary Help of Christians.

Maritza Velasquez, the guidance counselor, says that most of the first graduating class will stay close to home. A couple may attend Georgetown, and others are considering the University of Maryland, the University of the District of Columbia, Catholic University, Howard University, George Mason University, and Montgomery College. Some are looking at Xavier University in New Orleans, and one really wants to go to Princeton (Ms. Velasquez says she has a good chance).

At the end of the blessings and ribbon-cuttings, the archbishop thanked and blessed the 3 servers who'd accompanied him thru Mass and the blessings.

Another reward for staff is seeing the students become Salesian in spirit. The SDBs have worked hard and effectively at that, in addition to the academic, work, and personal growth aspects of student life. Various staff have the highest praise for all of them, and Fr. Shafran also credits the support of the whole SDB community, based at Nativity Parish. Under Fr. Feliciano’s leadership, students have already taken part in two Gospel Roads programs, one local and one at Haverstraw-Stony Point.

One new staff member at DBCR is Kelly Schuster, a Salesian Domestic Volunteer (see entry below dated Aug. 11) from Newark, Del., who graduated this spring from DeSales University and is teaching theology and serving in campus ministry. Although present only a couple of weeks, she’s already credited as a great addition to the staff.

Fr. Abe Feliciano and Kelly Schuster spoke with a reporter after the dedication of the new building, which includes the faith formation office.

Despite the financial, academic, and personal challenges, there’s a definite air of optimism throughout DBCR. “We’re here to stay,” Fr. Shafran assured Abp. Wuerl and everyone else at Mass.