News from pages past
50 years ago — March 11, 1966
Overall view in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday as Pope Paul blessed a fleet of 72 trucks and the food they are to distribute to the hungry people of India. The pope’s appeal for aid to famine-sufferers, sponsored by L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican daily, had reached almost $3 million in contributions at the end of February.
25 years ago — March 15, 1991
Problem solving
There are exceptions, but as a whole, Catholic schools in Hawaii are struggling. They are now at the bottom end of the most precipitous drop in enrollment ever, their once-unquestioned academic quality is in danger, and low salaries seriously challenge the loyalty of their teachers.
But there’s hope.
Two Saturdays ago on March 2, the diocese’s Catholic School Department began a study that, in a little more than a year, will offer proposals designed to solve these and other problems for the next 10-15 years.
Catholic education expert John J. Convey, Ph.D., of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., who is heading the study, calls it an “intensive consultative process.”
Intensive it will be. Every parish, including the 32 that don’t have schools, has been asked to participate.
10 years ago — March 10, 2006
A different kind of faculty “retreat” — into the community
What’s the opposite of retreat? Advance? Then the Maryknoll School faculty members experienced an “advance” Feb. 3 as they contemplated the core of their educational mission, not in sanctuary and solitude, but in busy little corners of the broader community.
The idea was to do something different for a faculty retreat. So rather than come together in a quiet spot to reflect, the teachers and administrators split up into groups and drove out to places where they had never been, to do things they had never done.
That morning, they delivered food to elderly shut-ins, cleared weeds at a nature center, cleaned a beach, donated blood, sorted shoes, stocked food pantry shelves and visited a homeless shelter among other things. They all got back together in the afternoon to discuss their experiences and to cap the day with prayer.