The Catholic Spirit - April 28, 2022

April 28, 2022 • Newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis

SPECIAL REPORT

TROUBLING PAST The Church’s role in America’s Indian boarding school era — Pages 9-12

A priest and children stand in front of a church at an Indian boarding school, circa 1900.

COURTESY MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SPRING & SUMMER PARISH FESTIVAL GUIDE — Page 18 REGINA HOSPITAL MERGER 5 | VISITING WAR-TORN UKRAINE 6 | ACCW AWARDEES 7 CONTROVERSIAL PRAYERS 8 | LIFE COACH’S CREATIVITY 13 | WAHLBERG ON ‘FATHER STU’ 20

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APRIL 28, 2022

PAGETWO We live in a changing climate, and we have a moral obligation to respond thoughtfully and respectfully as Christ himself would,” caring for one another and working together “to care for our common home with dedicated vigilance.

Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory at the April 21 opening ceremony of a conference on “Climate Change and the Future of Work” at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

NEWS notes

COURTESY MOLLIE O’HOWARD

EMBLEM MASS Scouts of many ages, adult leaders, friends and family participated in a Mass celebrated by Archbishop Bernard Hebda April 23 at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis as part of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Catholic Committee on Scouting emblem awards ceremony. After Mass, Scouts were recognized for their work in earning Ad Altare Dei and Pope Pius XII awards as part of demonstrating their reverence and duty to God. Cub Scouts in attendance were honored for earning the emblems Light of Christ and Parvuli Dei. Adults in Scouting were recognized for their efforts in developing Catholic youth ministry.

Barb Rode, president and CEO of St. Therese senior care centers, will be inducted May 13 into the Hall of Honor of senior living news and information organization McKnight’s at a ceremony in Chicago. The national honor comes on the eve of Rode’s retirement this year, after 21 years leading an organization that provides senior care, housing and services in the Twin Cities area. St. Therese announced Rode’s successor April 22: Craig Abbott, who will take the helm in late May. Most recently, Abbott served as executive vice president of Minneapolis-based Health Dimensions Group. During Rode’s tenure, St. Therese expanded from one senior community in New Hope to senior centers in Oxbow Lake and Woodbury, the palliative care facility St. Therese at St. Odilia and a rehabilitation service, Ascend Rehabilitation. She will be among 19 executives of skilled nursing, senior living or home care organizations inducted into McKnight’s Hall of Honor this year.

St. Thomas Academy senior Matthew Korf of Woodbury has been named Eagle Scout of the Year in Minnesota by the American Legion Department of Minnesota.

That puts Korf into contention for the national American Legion Eagle Scout of the Year, which brings with it a $10,000 scholarship. Actively involved at St. Ambrose in Woodbury and a Junior Achievement facilitator at an inner-city elementary school, Korf became an Eagle Scout in June 2021 after finishing his Eagle project, a raisedbed community garden at St. Ambrose Catholic School. After graduating from STA in Mendota Heights, Korf plans to serve in the military. He has been accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, as well as the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, on both Army and Navy ROTC scholarships.

The annual May Day Family Rosary Procession is 2 p.m. May 1 in St. Paul from the State Capitol to the Cathedral of St. Paul, 239 Selby Ave. Line-up begins at 1:15 p.m. at the steps of the State Capitol. Parishes are encouraged to bring banners to represent their communities. First communicants are invited to wear first Communion attire. People who cannot walk the procession route may go directly to the Cathedral to pray the rosary with those who are in procession. The event is sponsored by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis with Minnesota Family Rosary Processions. Learn more at minnesotarosaryprocessions.org.

PRACTICING Catholic COURTESY SAM JOHNSON, DELASALLE HIGH SCHOOL

FOUNDER’S DAY CELEBRATION Archbishop Bernerd Hebda celebrates Mass April 26 at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis in honor of Founder’s Day. In 17th century France, St. John Baptist de La Salle founded a teaching order of religious brothers, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, commonly known as the Christian Brothers. Members of this order have served in schools around the world, including DeLaSalle, which continues to be guided by the order’s Lasallian tradition. During the Mass, the Christian Brothers honored Archbishop Hebda with the “Letters of Affiliation” for having served Lasallian ideals in an extraordinary way. While growing up, the archbishop was taught by Christian Brothers in Pittsburgh at South Hills Catholic High School, now called Seton-La Salle Catholic High School. In a 2018 column in The Catholic Spirit, Archbishop Hebda said that experience “has made all the difference in my life.”

In this Easter season, with people brought into full communion with the Church at Easter through baptism, confirmation and first Communion, The Catholic Spirit asks readers, “Do you carry a vivid memory from your first Communion or confirmation? What does that memory mean for you now?” Send responses of 200 words or less to CatholicSpirit@archspm.org with “Readers Respond” in the subject line. Your reflection may be included in a future edition of The Catholic Spirit.

The Catholic Spirit is published semi-monthly for The Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis Vol. 27 — No. 8 MOST REVEREND BERNARD A. HEBDA, Publisher TOM HALDEN, Associate Publisher MARIA C. WIERING, Editor-in-Chief JOE RUFF, News Editor

United in Faith, Hope and Love

On the April 22 “Practicing Catholic” show, Maria Wiering, editorin-chief of The Catholic Spirit, interviews Allison Spies, archives manager at the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, about the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School initiative and the approximately 360 schools that had operated in the U.S. The show also features four religious brothers who discuss consecrated life and what it’s like to serve as a brother among fathers, ahead of Religious Brothers Day, May 1: Dominican Brother Joe Trout, a friar from Oak Park, Illinois, who served for one year at Holy Rosary in Minneapolis, and Jesuit Brother Ken Homan, a doctoral student at Georgetown University; and Brother Larry Schatz, a member of the De La Salle Brothers, and Brother Logan Murray, a member of the Brotherhood of Hope serving in college campus ministry in Minneapolis. Listen to interviews after they have aired at PracticingCatholicShow.com or anchor.fm/practicing-catholicshow with links to podcasting platforms.

CORRECTION A photo caption on Page 2 of the April 7 edition incorrectly stated that Bishop Donald Kettler of St. Cloud is retired. He is not.

Materials credited to CNS copy­righted by Catholic News Service.

All other materials copyrighted by The Cath­olic Spirit Newspaper.

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APRIL 28, 2022

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 3

FROMTHEMODERATOROFTHECURIA ONLY JESUS | FATHER CHARLES LACHOWITZER

Let there be light

I

t has been said that electricity transformed the night into day. Yet all the variations of invented light cannot overcome the darkness of evil and its shadows of sin, suffering and death. All of life’s disappointments and discouragements move like a fog to obscure the joy of life. No matter the historical achievements of the past, the complex enlightenment of the mind does not come from lofty thoughts. They are gifts from the Creator.

In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1:1-4, it is written: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.

Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light.

God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness.”

God created the entire universe out of nothing and out of love. The breath and word of the first “big bang.”

The second “big bang” by the same breath and word of God is the creation of each soul at conception. Again, God says, “Let there be light.”

In the first chapter and first verses from the Gospel of St. John, it is written: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be through him was life, and this life

Que haya luz

S

e ha dicho que la electricidad transformó la noche en día. Sin embargo, todas las variaciones de la luz inventada no pueden vencer la oscuridad del mal y sus sombras de pecado, sufrimiento y muerte. Todas las decepciones y desánimos de la vida se mueven como una niebla para oscurecer la alegría de vivir. No importa los logros históricos del pasado, la compleja iluminación de la mente no proviene de pensamientos elevados. Son regalos del Creador.

En el primer capítulo del primer libro de la Biblia, Génesis 1:1-4, está escrito: “En el principio, cuando Dios creó los cielos y la tierra, y la tierra no tenía forma ni figura, y las tinieblas cubrían el abismo y un viento recio que barría las aguas.

Entonces dijo Dios: Sea la luz, y fue la luz.

Dios vio que la luz era buena. Entonces Dios separó la luz de las tinieblas”.

The inner light of the soul is a switch given to us at baptism.

then and only with the grace of God, do we persevere through the sin of the world and the sin within.

An image I have often used is a room. When we walk into a room and it is dark, we do not look for a darkness switch to turn off the darkness. There is no such thing.

That is why prayers to turn off the darkness of evil in the world seem to go unanswered. In the room, however, there is a light switch. When we turn on the light, the darkness vanishes.

Even in a cave where it has been dark for so long the fish are blind, one lit candle makes that ancient darkness flee. Darkness has no power in the presence of light — except the power we give it. In the words of an ancient proverb, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

iSTOCK PHOTO | STEPHEN BARNES

was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

Even in the Easter season of double “alleluias,” we still pray fervently that the works of evil cease and the common good prevail. Yet the path out of Eden has been a challenging road back to Paradise. Until

Dios creó todo el universo de la nada y por amor. El aliento y la palabra del primer “big bang”. El segundo “big bang” por el mismo aliento y palabra de Dios es la creación de cada alma en la concepción. De nuevo, Dios dice: “Hágase la luz”.

En el primer capítulo y primeros versículos del Evangelio de San Juan, está escrito: “En el principio era el Verbo, y el Verbo estaba con Dios, y el Verbo era Dios. Él estaba en el principio con Dios.

Todas las cosas llegaron a ser a través de él, y sin él nada llegó a ser. Lo que vino a ser a través de él fue la vida, y esta vida fue la luz de la raza humana; la luz brilla en las tinieblas, y las tinieblas no la han vencido. Un hombre llamado Juan fue enviado por Dios. Vino por testimonio, para dar testimonio de la luz, a fin de que todos creyeran por él. Él no era la luz, sino que vino a dar testimonio de la luz.

La luz verdadera, que ilumina a todos, venía al mundo”.

Incluso en el tiempo pascual de

The inner light of the soul is a switch given to us at baptism. We are recreated as “children of the light.”

Grace, the power of God’s favor, is our ability to make the assent of faith and turn on the light. The sacraments of reconciliation and Eucharist are two of the most reachable light switches. The person and real presence of Jesus Christ is the light that is victorious over the powers of sin and death.

At the Easter Vigil, one lit candle was the source for hundreds of lit candles spread throughout the darkened church. The radiance of the risen Christ shines in and through our hearts into the darkness of the world.

The joy of faith walks through the shadows of a mortally flawed life when every experience of the darkness of Good Friday gives way to the light of Easter.

dobles “aleluyas”, todavía rezamos fervientemente para que cesen las obras del mal y prevalezca el bien común. Sin embargo, la salida del Edén ha sido un camino difícil de regreso al Paraíso. Hasta entonces y solo con la gracia de Dios, perseveramos a través del pecado del mundo y el pecado interior.

Una imagen que he usado a menudo es una habitación. Cuando entramos en una habitación y está oscuro, no buscamos un interruptor de oscuridad para apagar la oscuridad. No existe tal cosa. Es por eso que las oraciones para apagar la oscuridad del mal en el mundo parecen quedar sin respuesta.

En la habitación, sin embargo, hay un interruptor de luz. Cuando encendemos la luz, la oscuridad se desvanece.

Incluso en una cueva donde ha estado oscuro durante tanto tiempo que los peces están ciegos, una vela encendida hace huir esa oscuridad antigua. La oscuridad no tiene poder en presencia de la luz, excepto el poder que le damos.

En palabras de un antiguo proverbio, “Es mejor encender una vela que maldecir la oscuridad”.

La luz interior del alma es un interruptor que se nos da en el bautismo.

Somos recreados como “hijos de la luz”.

La gracia, el poder del favor de Dios, es nuestra capacidad de dar el asentimiento de la fe y encender la luz. Los sacramentos de la reconciliación y la Eucaristía son dos de los interruptores de luz más accesibles.

La persona y presencia real de Jesucristo es la luz que triunfa sobre los poderes del pecado y de la muerte.

En la Vigilia Pascual, una vela encendida fue la fuente de cientos de velas encendidas repartidas por toda la iglesia a oscuras. El resplandor de Cristo resucitado brilla en ya través de nuestros corazones en la oscuridad del mundo.

La alegría de la fe camina a través de las sombras de una vida mortalmente defectuosa cuando cada experiencia de la oscuridad del Viernes Santo da paso a la luz de la Pascua.

Pope Francis: Good or bad nations do not exist; wickedness is everywhere

By Carol Glatz Catholic News Service There is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” nation because wickedness can be found everywhere, Pope Francis said.

“Once there was a habit of dividing humanity into the good and the bad: ‘This country is good,’ ‘But it makes bombs!’ ‘No, it’s good and this one is bad,’” he said in off-the-cuff remarks April 25 at the Vatican.

“No. Today wickedness has pervaded everyone and there are good and bad people in every country. Wickedness, today, is everywhere, in every nation.

Perhaps even at the Vatican!” he said.

The pope made his remarks during an audience with members of the Trinitarians who were in Rome attending an annual conference of Trinitarian International Solidarity, the order’s international organization that supports communities of persecuted Christians.

The Trinitarians were founded by St. John de Matha in the 12th century to promote devotion to the Holy Trinity.

In the beginning, the order’s unique apostolate was the ransom of Christians held captive by nonbelievers during the Crusades, reflected in their formal name of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and

of the Captives.

Today, the order’s apostolate includes parish ministry, education, chaplaincies in prisons and hospitals, and work with the homeless, and they also offer solidarity with and advocate on behalf of victims of persecution, torture and oppression.

Pope Francis thanked them for their special charism, which is “flagrantly timely, unfortunately.”

Today, the world boasts that slavery has been abolished, “when, in reality, there are many, too many men and women, even children, reduced to living in inhumane conditions, reduced to

slavery,” he said.

Their conference on religious persecution also is timely, he said, because it is highlighting how “religious freedom is violated and sometimes trampled upon in many places and in different ways — sometimes crudely and openly, other times subtly and hidden from sight.”

The pope apologized for having to greet the members while he was sitting down because of his knee.

The pain, he said, is being caused by “that affliction that, once upon a time, was called ‘Nun’s Knee’” because it is most often caused by frequent kneeling.

4 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

APRIL 28, 2022

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Archbishop Bernard Hebda gives a blessing to Lori Macdonald, left, and one of her golden retrievers, P.J., on Easter Sunday April 17 at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul. It is the third year of a tradition that started in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when churches were closed due to concerns about spreading the illness. Even though churches now are open and masking requirements lifted, the archbishop wants to continue the annual practice. “I have never participated in a drive-up ... blessing,” Macdonald said.

“I just thought it would be such a unique experience. We were having a quieter Easter Sunday after Mass. I had dinner in the oven and we all just got in the car. And, it was really neat. …

We just decided to bring the dogs because they love the car.

And, we thought, they could use a blessing, too.” At right in the vehicle is Macdonald’s son Ryan with their golden retriever Elsa.

Also in the car were Macdonald’s husband, Jim, and sons Josh and Luke. The family belongs to St. Agnes in St. Paul.

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APRIL 28, 2022

LOCAL

Regina merger won’t change Catholic identity

By Barb Umberger The Catholic Spirit Regina Hospital in Hastings will merge with United Hospital 25 miles away in St. Paul this August under one hospital license for the two campuses, simplifying patient transfers and billing for the institutions already owned by Allina Health, hospital leaders said.

The new arrangement, however, will not impact the Catholic identity that has been part of Regina Hospital since its founding in 1953 by the Sisters of Charity, Our Lady Mother of Mercy, officials said.

“It’s part of our culture, who we are, and it’s how we serve our patients,” said Helen Strike, Regina Hospital president. As part of its “Catholicity,” the hospital provides “a strong spiritual care team” facilitated by the hospital chaplain, and an employee-led “mission integration team” that “keeps close to our hearts our Catholic past and future,” such as celebrating Catholic Heritage Week.

United Hospital, the largest hospital in the Twin Cities east metropolitan area, serves more than 200,000 patients a year, according to Allina’s website.

It has been part of Allina since the 1990s.

The Sisters of Charity ran Regina until 1991, when they transferred the hospital to the community of Hastings. The 57-bed hospital joined Allina in 2014, creating “all the positive things about being part of a health care system,” Strike said, such as contracts with vendors that helped the hospital navigate COVID-19 supply chain challenges in a way that might not be possible for a small, independent hospital.

Now, Regina’s merger with United means “you behave like you’re part of the same hospital,” Strike said. “So, when (Regina) patients need higher levels of care, or when they need to move back and forth between the campuses for procedures or to recover, we just transfer them, versus having to admit them in one place and discharge, and then admit and discharge in the other (facility).”

Lynn Moratzka serves on Regina’s community board as a representative of the Regina Health Care Board, which reports to Archbishop Bernard Hebda of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The Health

As the Archdiocesan Synod Assembly approaches, Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis are encouraged to pray a novena leading up to the June 3-5 event.

“It’s this whole sense of keeping our eyes fixed on the goal,” said Debbie Keller, a member of the Archdiocesan Synod’s executive team and prayer team. “Through prayer, that discernment and wisdom comes.”

The Synod Assembly will bring about 500 Catholics from parishes and other leadership roles to CretinDerham Hall high school in St. Paul for prayer, speakers and discernment. The Assembly is the final step in the three-year Archdiocesan Synod process.

The novena, or a nine-day prayer, is a way for all Catholics to unite in prayer to support the Synod Assembly, said Keller, a parishioner of St. Pius X in White Bear Lake.

“When you have multiple people praying the same prayer, something beautiful happens,” she said. “It’s a way to transform our hearts to be docile to the Holy Spirit and to realize we’re not alone in doing this. We are with multitudes of people praying this novena.”

The “Novena to the Holy Spirit for the Archdiocesan Synod” begins May 27 and continues to June 4, the first full day of the Synod Assembly. Those praying are asked to pray with two intentions: First, “that the Synod will help our archdiocese discern and establish clear pastoral priorities in a way that will both promote greater unity and lead us to a more vigorous proclamation of Jesus’ good news renewing our local Church,” and second, “that the Holy Spirit will guide the discussions and discernment at the

On Easter, archbishop says Resurrection can still rock the world

By Barb Umberger The Catholic Spirit

DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

Regina Hospital is located at 1175 Nininger Road in Hastings.

Care Board helps ensure that Allina follows a 13-page Catholic Stewardship Agreement it signed with Regina in 2014, Moratzka said.

The agreement includes ethical and religious directives, “all the things that were in effect and operating at the time that (Allina) agreed to take over the responsibilities of the hospital, that they would continue doing those,” she said. The directives include adhering to ethical and religious directives for health care services approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and to specific situations under the guidance of the archbishop.

“We wanted to make sure that nothing was changing,” Moratzka said. “There would still be Regina in the name, all of the symbols, the statues, … the chaplains — all of those things that are part of our identity, and they will continue to be part of our identity.” As a Catholic hospital, it’s also “our Christian faith and duty to provide these services for everybody,” she said.

Allina owns 11 hospitals, two of which are Catholic — Regina and St. Francis Regional Medical Center in Shakopee, which is sponsored by the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery in Duluth.

Archdiocesan Synod Assembly novena begins May 27

By Maria Wiering The Catholic Spirit

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 5

Archdiocesan Synod Assembly.”

The text for each day of the novena can be found at archspm.org/synod/pray. Catholics are encouraged to join in, in whatever way they can, even if they cannot pray the full novena.

In 2019, Archbishop Bernard Hebda initiated the Archdiocesan Synod with a Pentecost Mass, followed by 30 Prayer and Listening Events held that fall and winter. Those Prayer and Listening Events led the archbishop to identify the Synod’s three focus areas: 1. Forming parishes that are in the service of evangelization, 2. Forming missionary disciples who know Jesus’ love and respond to his call, and 3.

Forming youth and young adults in and for a Church that is always young.

Last fall, Catholics across the archdiocese were invited to reflect on those focus areas through the Parish Consultation with Small Groups, a six-week series held in parishes. Feedback from those small groups led to the creation of propositions of actions that could be taken to meet the aims of the focus areas. Those propositions were refined through the Parish Synod Leadership Team Consultation, which took place in parishes in late February and early March.

Synod Assembly participants will prayerfully discern which propositions will lead to renewal in the local Church, and make recommendations to Archbishop Hebda. He will consider those recommendations as he prepares a pastoral letter that is slated for release on the feast of Christ the King, Nov. 20. The letter, which will provide priorities and direction for parishes, will be followed by an action plan.

“God wants us to ask him and not presume upon him,” Keller said. “Without prayer, the laborers cannot build according to his plan.”

“How wonderful to hear those ‘alleluias’ and be able to proclaim in a full Basilica that Christ is truly risen,” Archbishop Bernard Hebda said as he greeted the faithful during Mass April 17 at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.

Given it was Easter morning, the archbishop began his homily describing a cartoon of a chocolate Easter bunny on a psychiatrist’s couch: “What brings you here, sir?” asked the psychiatrist. The chocolate bunny replied, “I’m feeling so hollow inside these days.”

Given the unsettling news out of Ukraine, another COVID-19 variant and reports of record-breaking inflation and crime rates, it’s not surprising that, like the chocolate bunny, “we might have been feeling somewhat hollow these days, as well,” Archbishop Hebda said. The rigors of Lent can bring us down “and the weatherman hasn’t been helping either,” he said.

But the rituals and readings of Easter celebrations point to the reality of Christ’s victory over death, he said, which should “fill us with hope and compel us to go forward in joy-filled service.” In the midst of a hurting world, “we have the privilege and, indeed, the obligation to proclaim that sin and death aren’t victorious,” the archbishop said. “Christ is risen. He is truly risen.”

The resurrection “changed everything” and continues to do so, Archbishop Hebda said. “It should remind us that we have a God who loves us deeply in spite of our weaknesses and our sinfulness, a God who desires to be with us in our sorrow and confusion, a God who desires to lift us out of our malaise.”

In the Easter season, the archbishop said the faithful would be hearing at Mass about the powerful transformation of the Apostles and disciples as they made the transition from “the reality of Good Friday” — the low point of human history, he said, as “the innocent Jesus was put to death” — to the high point, as they encountered the risen Lord, “who breathed on them the reconciling breath of the Holy Spirit, who offered them forgiveness, who sent them forth into the world to make disciples of all nations.”

It’s not hard to imagine that Mary Magdalene and the Apostles would have been despondent after losing their beloved teacher, Archbishop Hebda said. Yet, when they hear of his resurrection, gaze into the empty tomb or encounter the risen Christ, “their hearts are burning within them,” he said. They are overjoyed and given reason for hope — a hope that has been communicated for 20 centuries, he said.

“The resurrection rocked their world and can rock ours as well, if we allow it,” the archbishop said.

The Exsultet, the Easter proclamation sung at the Easter Vigil Mass, spoke of the sanctifying power of Easter that dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen and joy to mourners, drives out hatred and brings down the mighty, Archbishop Hebda said.

“It’s that power, that amazing power, that phenomenal power that we hunger for in Ukraine, in our Twin Cities and in our homes,” he said. “It’s that power that has drawn so many this year to the waters of baptism and to the other Easter sacraments here at the Basilica and throughout the archdiocese and around the world. It’s nothing that we deserve, but a gift that we’re freely given.”

During recent Synod consultations throughout the archdiocese, he said it was clear that the local Church is looking for new ways to grow “in our Easter faith and to share it effectively with others.”

“Easter naturally leads us to the work of evangelization, the sharing of our personal experience of Christ,” he said.

At the end of Mass, Archbishop Hebda asked congregants to continue to take the Easter message forward “into our homes and into our communities with great hope and conviction. … We can offer credibility by the way that we lead our lives.”

6 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

LOCAL

APRIL 28, 2022

St. Constantine music director returns to Minneapolis after three weeks in Ukraine

By Barb Umberger The Catholic Spirit Yuri Ivan, music director at St. Constantine Ukrainian Catholic Church in Minneapolis, recently returned to the Twin Cities from a threeweek journey to his battle-worn home country of Ukraine. He left March 18 on a flight to Budapest, Hungary, then traveled to the border by car and walked into Ukraine.

Ivan stayed with his ailing mother, who is legally blind, and his sister in their third-story apartment in a town in western Ukraine that had not been hit by Russian bombing or combat troops that have assailed the country since Feb. 24. The Catholic Spirit is not publishing the name of the town out of security concerns.

“Once I heard my mom was in a hospital, I had to get on a plane ASAP, and the war didn’t matter at the time,” he said.

Presently, no combat is taking place near his family’s residence, but “the notion of war” is ever present, he said.

For one, “the air raid sirens wear you out,” he said. “It’s psychologically hard.”

Faith helps his family, Ivan said. And faith is very much part of everyday life for many in Ukraine, he said.

“People kept their faith during World War II, and during the Soviet times when our Church was outlawed,” Ivan said. “Many ended up in gulags for their faith,” he said, including some in his family.

“Of course, with the start of the war, we put even more emphasis on praying for peace, for prisoners and for those in need,” he said. “With that said, I don’t think faith ‘kicked into a higher gear’ with the start of the war. It was always (an) important part of (our) being.”

Faith is especially important to Ukrainian refugees, he said. “There is nothing else left but faith because they

DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

Yuri Ivan stands in front of St. Constantine Ukrainian Catholic Church in Minneapolis, where he is music director. Ivan spent three weeks in Ukraine recently to help his ailing mother and his sister. lost everything.”

In the Ukrainian Catholic Church, married men are permitted to be ordained clergy. Ivan said his grandfather was a priest in the “underground Church,” when attending liturgies was banned. “During Soviet times, we worshiped at my grandparents’ place with windows and doors closed, and blinds down so that the neighbors couldn’t see or hear,” he said. “We attend church services regularly.”

With his mother’s limited mobility, she no longer attends Mass in person, but she livestreams it from local churches daily.

Her radio is preset to a local Catholic station, Ivan said.

Ivan attended Mass at a local Byzantine Catholic Church. It is a small but vibrant parish, he said, and “a living example” of how faith helps parishioners live

during times of war and assist others.

“They run the only branch of the L’Arche Community in town,” he said, “an organization that creates a community for people with mental challenges to interact and work alongside people without disability as equals.” His sister, who has Down syndrome, participates.

Ivan heard up to five sirens every 24 hours in Ukraine. Once a second siren follows the first, “you have to listen carefully,” he said, because the second siren can mean a missile is coming and residents have about five minutes to get into a basement. Sirens go off in a wide territory until officials zero in on the locality where the missile is approaching, he said.

“Then they turn on the three-minute or five-minute warning siren,” Ivan said. “But usually what we hear is the cancellation,” he said, with a message by text or through loudspeakers that “you can return to normal life.”

The first siren usually comes with a message saying “run for shelter,” he said.

And when the sirens begin, churches ring their bells, too, until the cancellation, he said. Church bells ring because not all areas have loudspeakers, Ivan said. And if the bells ring long enough “that’s the warning signal,” he said.

When Ivan entered Ukraine on foot, he was the only person walking toward the country. He saw “swarms of refugees” leaving, Ivan said. He was motivated by reports of his mother’s failing health and the need to arrange a caretaker for her.

The good news is that his mother is doing a lot better, he said. Today, she uses a walker instead of a cane, “but she can walk herself and she takes care of herself,” he said. Ivan was able to arrange for a caretaker and organize her daily routine in a way that she gets the help she needs.

Ivan has “a big extended family” in that part of Ukraine. “So, there is help and a family community,” he said.

Family members bring her “whatever she needs,” he said. Despite the war, family gatherings are taking place, including those at Easter. Churches are open and full, he said, including many in the congregation wearing military attire.

Ivan’s hometown looks the same but traffic is “overflowing” and long lines

for food are common. He saw no food shortages. Ivan attributed the congestion to the quadrupling of his hometown’s population due to refugees moving through, including “tons of people” who have lost everything, he said.

He recalled one Saturday when crowds were so large, he felt like he was at “a football match trying to exit the stadium.”

Residents are trying to lead normal lives, he said, but many are hosting refugees. “My cousin probably had 30 people since the start of the war, from different groups.” Some people open their homes to refugees, some churches open their rectories and some refugees want to find a more stable living situation, but rent has quadrupled in his hometown, Ivan said, making it difficult to find a place.

Ivan visited a local Byzantine Catholic Church that housed 25 refugees in its small “parish house.”

Ivan said he is not the type of person who cries easily. But when he crossed the border on foot and saw refugees fleeing and in makeshift camps, and heard their stories, he was moved.

One woman he talked with had traveled hundreds of miles toward the border and began using a wheelchair “because she couldn’t walk anymore,” he said. “They put her in a wheelchair and she was crying about one of her children left in the hospital 30 miles behind because the child got sick and couldn’t go (with the family) and was stuck in the hospital. So that’s tragic,” he said.

Ivan hopes that Ukrainians have the resolve to not give up, to carry on with their everyday lives and eventually prevail. “We all hope” the war will end sooner rather than later, he said. “Because the more it drags out, the more suffering it brings.”

Ivan, who completed his doctoral studies in conducting at the University of Minnesota, serves as music director of the Linden Hills Chamber Orchestra in the Twin Cities, and since 2007, as artistic director of the Kenwood Symphony in Minneapolis and as a conductor for the Metropolitan Ballet. Before emigrating to the U.S. in 2001, he was a resident conductor for the State Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, from 1996-2000.

Russian rockets recently hit Lviv, a cultural center in western Ukraine, where Ivan studied for seven years. He has friends who live north of Kyiv and some were in a nearby village occupied

by Russian troops for days. A friend’s wife watched what was happening from a basement, peeking outside “and seeing really horrifying (things),” Ivan said. She was never discovered. She left when the Ukrainian Army came back to the village, he said.

Some of his friends, classmates and fellow musicians are fighting on the front lines. “They are fighting for Ukraine wearing body armor and camouflage instead of tuxedos,” he said.

Ivan has no immediate plans to return to Ukraine. But he has returned to his work with the choir at St. Constantine, and with the Linden Hills Orchestra and the Kenwood Symphony. Both Linden Hills and Kenwood have upcoming performances: the orchestra April 28 at St. Albert the Great in Minneapolis and the symphony May 21.

LOCAL

APRIL 28, 2022

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 7

ACCW to honor four laywomen in Albertville at annual convention

By Barb Umberger The Catholic Spirit Four women from across the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis are being honored by the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women for parishlevel involvement with their respective councils, parishes and communities.

Recipients of the 2022 Laywoman Volunteer Award will be formally recognized April 29 at the ACCW’s 89th annual convention at St. Albert in Albertville. The following information was provided by the ACCW. To learn more, visit accwarchspm.org.

4-H boosters and the Catholic United Financial Volunteer award. For 30 years, Androli coordinated area visits by the Red Cross Bloodmobile. She and her husband, Francis, hosted a Rural Life Mass in 2003 for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Her home has often been the collection point for items sent to Haiti, Abria Pregnancy Resources, Sharing and Caring Hands, Santa Anonymous, local school families, Appalachian families and other charities.

LOIS HUBER Our Lady of the Prairie, Belle Plaine

MARY ANDROLI

Lois Huber, 66, served for many St. Andrew, Elysian years as chair Mary Androli, for her parish’s 80, has served “dining room” as president of during its fall her parish’s festival and, Council of more recently, Catholic serves as Women sacristan for daily for many Mass, laundress years, and in for sacred linens, lector twice a week for all other CCW daily Mass and a substitute for weekend offices, as well as liturgies, and as an extraordinary ACCW secretary, commission chairs minister of holy Communion. She serves and vice chairs, and chaired ACCW’s as environmental coordinator for her International Concerns Commission. parish, maintaining plants and flowers She helped organize the first parish for Christmas and Easter seasons, and pastoral council and served as its she leads church decorating during president, and served on the planning the harvest season. Huber is one of the board when the parish was building women serving the parish chapter of the its new church in 2006-2007. Androli Seven Sisters apostolate who pray weekly was active in and an officer of her for the parish pastor. She leads the rosary local American Legion Auxiliary, Lake before daily Mass, is small group leader Area Women, and her children’s high for the parish book club and helped school booster club, wrestling club plan the special liturgy for the feast day and band mothers’ group. At her of St. Joseph. Huber also coordinated a parish, Androli has served as a faith procession during that Mass for parish formation teacher. She serves as a school students who carried fresh lilies lector, extraordinary minister of holy to the St. Joseph altar. Huber is co-chair Communion and speaker at parish and of one of the parish’s “funeral circles,” ACCW events. She led her parish quilt and helps prepare the room and lunch makers who made hundreds of quilts and cleans up when the parish hosts for the homeless, Santa Anonymous deanery meetings for priests. As stated recipients and others in need. She has by her nominator, she is willing to help received awards including from thenmultiple times a year when cooking Gov. Rudy Perpich for service to her for priests during communal penance children’s school, the school’s sports services. Huber served as a catechist booster club and recognition from FFA, CathSpFL-C-2022.qxp_Layout 1 1/25/22 12:31 PM for Pa her children’s classes from seventh

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KATHY MORALES Immaculate Conception, Columbia Heights Kathy Morales, 80, has been an active member of CCW for 34 years, serving as her council’s secretary, vice president and president.

She organizes parish participation in 40 Days for Life, providing transportation when needed.

Morales participates each year in the local March for Life and Catholics at the Capitol, and helps organize CCW fundraisers for parish and school needs, community concerns, and national and global charities. At her parish, she leads volunteers cleaning the church each week, helps with the annual women’s Lenten retreat, prays or leads the rosary before funeral Masses for deceased members of Immaculate Conception’s CCW, chairs a booth at the summer festival, coordinates the annual CCW baby shower for Birthright and Abria Pregnancy Resources, and chairs annual fundraisers at Easter and Christmas.

Morales also contributes baked goods and handmade crafts to the annual CCW Christmas boutique. She is a member of the Seven Sisters apostolate for the parish and, since 2010, has chaired the Family Concerns Commission for CCW, keeping membership informed of legislation impacting Catholic families. Morales is a substitute for parish adorers who cannot serve their hour, has delivered Meals on Wheels, fed the homeless at Mary’s Place and at the Catholic Charities Opportunity Center in Minneapolis, and provides literature at membership meetings to keep members informed on NCCW, ACCW and deanery issues.

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grade through their junior years in high school, and volunteered as the school librarian when her children attended Our Lady of the Prairie Catholic School.

BARB YORK St. Pius X, White Bear Lake Barb York, 68, served as spirituality chair on the CCW board from 2008-2010, co-chaired her parish’s involvement in Rediscover Catholicism in 2012, and participated in and helped promote the parish pilgrimage to see Pope Francis in 2015 during his U.S. visit. She has co-chaired or been involved in annual parish festivals, participated in the parish strategic planning committee from 2014-2016 and was parishioner delegate to the “Amazing Parish” leadership team from 2015-2021.

York served as hospitality chair for the parish’s five-year capital campaign in 2016, new parishioner welcome ministry coordinator since 2018, co-organizer of the parish retired mortgage celebration in 2021, Archdiocesan Synod small group leader in 2021, parish office volunteer and weekly parish money counter. She started Bible studies at the parish, served as a faith formation teacher, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults teacher and sponsor, and has led a weekly lectio divina group, starting with CCW members, since 2013. In 2017, she started an email prayer warriors ministry that now has 90 members. In 2011, she became the “anchoress” for the first Seven Sisters apostolate. York has served as an extraordinary minister of holy Communion to the homebound for 20 years. She volunteers at a Cerenity Care Center where she has led a weekly rosary for residents. In 2014, she led a mission trip to Kolkata, India, for 15 students from DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis and, in 2018, a mission trip to Kolkata for seminarians and University of Minnesota School of Public Health graduate students.

York participates in the annual local March for Life, prays outside Planned Parenthood during 40-hour vigils and supports an area LifeCare Center. She is active in many CCW activities.

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8 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

APRIL 28, 2022

NATION+WORLD

Court seems to side with football coach

By Carol Zimmermann Catholic News Service A majority of Supreme Court justices seemed to side with a former high school football coach who said his postgame prayers on the field — which cost him his job — amounted to private speech and not the public school’s endorsement of religion.

During nearly two hours of oral arguments April 25, several justices emphasized that private speech is still private, and protected by the First Amendment, even if it takes place on public grounds. But some justices also pointed out that this private prayer on the field could also seem coercive because players could feel like they should participate.

The case involves Joseph Kennedy, former assistant coach at Bremerton High School, near Seattle, who had been told by school district officials to stop postgame praying. When his contract was not renewed, he sued the school for violating his First Amendment rights.

A lower court agreed with the school district, bringing Kennedy to the nation’s high court seeking a reversal. Kennedy’s lawyer, Paul Clement, stressed that the “government doesn’t endorse all private speech just because it takes place on school grounds,” and said there was no evidence that students felt coerced to join in. But Richard Katskee, representing the school district, pointed out that Kennedy “insisted on giving audible prayers that students could join, and then he created a zoo on the field.”

The justices also brought up a number of hypothetical situations that seemed to emphasize that they did not think Kennedy’s actions on the field equaled government endorsement — such as coaches who cross themselves before a game or a math teacher who reads the Bible aloud before school starts.

An amicus brief filed in this case by Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative said the court should “remind lower courts and regulators that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is not an excuse for censorship.” The group also said the court should clarify its doctrines and discard the unworkable and unjustified “endorsement test.”

The “Lemon test,” which came up frequently in oral argument about the coach’s prayer, is based on a 1971 Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman and is used to determine if a law violates the First Amendment.

The coach said he made a commitment to thank

Joe Kennedy stands on a football field in this undated photo.

School officials at Bremerton High School in Washington suspended, and later fired, the football coach because he prayed on the field after football games.

CNS | COURTESY FIRST LIBERTY INSTITUTE

God after each game, win or lose, since he started coaching in 2008, and made it a point to kneel by the sideline after the game by himself for quiet prayer.

Eventually, he was joined in this practice by many of the team members.

One player’s parent said their son, an atheist, felt like he had to join in prayer or face potential loss of playing time. School district officials told Kennedy to stop the postgame prayers in keeping with the Constitution’s Establishment Clause prohibiting the government from favoring one religion over another.

Kennedy asked the school to just give him 15 seconds to kneel on the field for silent prayer when the players were off the field, which the school district officials denied, calling it a violation of policy. Instead, the school district offered to give the coach a private space to pray or said it would allow him to pray after the crowd had left the stadium.

Kennedy’s announcement that he would not comply prompted a large group of supporters — including parents, a state legislator and members of both teams — to join him at the 50-yard line after a game in October 2015. After that, the school district placed Kennedy on paid administrative leave.

During a performance review, the head football coach said Kennedy shouldn’t be rehired because he violated the school district’s policy. Kennedy did not seek to be rehired for the coaching position and instead filed his lawsuit in federal district court.

The Supreme Court decision in this case, Kennedy v.

Bremerton School District, is expected in June.

Bishops criticize ‘Synodal Path’; German bishop responds

By Barb Fraze Catholic News Service The president of the German bishops’ conference responded to an open letter from more than 70 bishops from four continents criticizing the German bishops’ Synodal path.

Bishop Georg Bätzing thanked the bishops for their April 11 letter and said he was glad they were taking the process of Germany’s Synodal Path seriously. But he assured them that “the Synodal Path in no way undermines the authority of the church, including that of Pope Francis, as you write.”

In a letter dated April 14 and published on the website of the German bishops’ conference, the Limburg bishop stated to letter signers from North America, Africa, Italy and Australia that the decision to embark on the Synodal Path was to confront the systemic causes of abuse and its cover-up. He said it was “our attempt to renew a credible proclamation of the Good News.”

The open letter to the Germans was signed by 49 bishops from the U.S., four from Canada, 19 Africans, one Italian and one Australian, Cardinal George Pell.

The list did not include any of Minnesota’s bishops.

The letter noted that “events in one nation inevitably impact ecclesial life elsewhere.” It raised seven criticisms, including “failing to listen to the Holy Spirit and the Gospel,” relying more on

“sociological analysis and contemporary political, including gender, ideologies” than on Scripture and Tradition, and being too focused on “power” and “autonomy.”

The Synodal Path includes forums in which questions are discussed and assemblies at which people from the forums report back, proposals are discussed and voted on. Some texts not only must receive approval of more than two-thirds of all delegates, clerical and lay, but also must have the approval of more than two-thirds of the bishops.

The Synodal Path is a separate process than the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops on Synodality, a two-year worldwide process that opened in October and will culminate in a meeting of bishops in Rome in 2023.

Concerns about the Synodal Path creating divisions and responding to pressures of the times are some of the main issues cited by Nordic and Polish bishops, who have also voiced their concerns publicly.

Bishop Bätzing has admitted that there have been highly divergent opinions on issues such as blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples or the ordination of women as deacons or priests.

The German Catholic news agency KNA reported he pledged that the bishops would submit all the synodal reform decisions that can only be implemented at the universal Church level to the worldwide synodal process launched by Pope Francis in preparation for the 2023 Synod of Bishops on synodality.

HEADLINES u Texas grants death penalty stay in one case, proceeds with execution in another. Death-row inmate Melissa Lucio, 53, a Catholic mother of 14 and a grandmother, was scheduled for execution April 27 for the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah, that Lucio has maintained was due to her daughter’s accidental fall down a stairwell. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which issued a last-minute stay of execution April 25, ordered the 138th Judicial District Court of Cameron County to consider the new evidence presented by Lucio’s legal team.

Just days earlier, on April 21, Texas executed a 78-year-old inmate, Carl Buntion. The Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops described Buntion’s execution as “an act of vengeance and retribution, not to preserve public safety or protect the common good.” In a statement released just after Buntion’s death, the bishops said that Buntion, one of the oldest death-row inmates, “was an elderly, infirm man suffering from multiple chronic health conditions and fighting pneumonia. He was of no threat to anyone.” Buntion, who was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, was sentenced to death for killing a Houston police officer, James Irby, during a traffic stop in 1990. The U.S. Supreme Court declined a request to stop his execution but in a one-paragraph statement about the court’s decision, Justice Stephen Breyer reiterated his concern about the constitutionality of the death penalty especially for someone on death row for 30 years. u Bishops back administration’s ‘Uniting for Ukraine’ refugee initiative. The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the chairman of its Committee on Migration have voiced their support for the Biden administration’s “Uniting for Ukraine” initiative to welcome Ukrainian refugees coming to the United States. “Many European countries have shown great concern for Ukrainians, welcoming them with open arms, and we should do the same,” said an April 22 joint statement from Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, USCCB president, and Auxiliary Bishop Mario Dorsonville, Migration Committee chairman. The USCCB and the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia have partnered with welcome.us on the Uniting for Ukraine initiative. u Pope makes appointments to dicasteries for development, doctrine. After serving as interim prefect and interim secretary respectively since Jan. 1, Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny has been appointed to a five-year term as prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and Italian Salesian Sister Alessandra Smerilli as the secretary of the same dicastery. Scalabrinian Father Fabio Baggio, who had been co-undersecretary of the dicastery’s Migrants and Refugees Section along with Cardinal Czerny, is now undersecretary of the dicastery with responsibility for the Migrants and Refugees Section and for special projects, the Vatican announced April 23. u Catholic University selling Dorothy dress to help school’s drama department. The blue and white gingham dress from “The Wizard of Oz,” which turned up last summer at The Catholic University of America after it was missing for nearly 40 years, is about to get a new home as the university plans to sell it and use the proceeds to help establish the school’s new film acting program. The costume, worn by Judy Garland, was given to the theater department head as a gift in 1973, but no one knew its whereabouts from the late 1980s until it was discovered during a campus theater renovation last year.

Now somewhat faded and yellowed, the dress is estimated to be worth $800,000 to $1.2 million. It will be auctioned May 24 in Los Angeles at the “Bonhams Classic Hollywood: Film and Television” sale run by the international auction house. u Priest says pope’s visit to Congo will let world know about its conflicts. A Catholic priest in Congo said Pope Francis will be visiting the country not only to reconcile it, but also to tell the world “about the conflicts that are tearing this country apart.” Father Georges Kalenga, a member of the planning committee who is also second deputy secretary-general of the Congolese bishops’ conference, said that the pope will be visiting July 2-5 to reconcile a people blighted by the evils of “tribalism, regionalism and clientelism, the exclusion of political opponents, practices and discourses that weaken social ties, compromise national cohesion on several levels, particularly on the socio-political level.” Pope Francis’ visit will include Kinshasa, the country’s capital, and Goma, in the east.

— Catholic News Service

APRIL 28, 2022

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 9

SPECIAL REPORT

The Indian boarding school legacy As Americans grapple with tragic past, Catholics part of efforts to shed light

Catholic bishops and leaders, including Archbishop Hebda, and representatives of the state’s tribes to discuss how the Church can assist the tribes’ efforts to gather information about the boarding schools.

By Maria Wiering The Catholic Spirit

Removing children from home

T

he doll is about 6 inches tall, handcrafted of red leather, with a tan belt and headband around its long black hair. It’s a male warrior, holding a bow.

“This is actually me,” D. Richard Wright said of the doll. The parishioner of Gichitwaa Kateri in south Minneapolis made it as part of an effort to process recent findings in Canada of what are believed to be hundreds of graves of children on the sites of former indigenous residential schools. Some Twin Cities American Indians — mostly women — gathered together to make “spirit dolls” representing the children in some of those graves, resulting in an exhibit called “215+” that was on view from November to January at Indigenous Roots in St. Paul.

Wright, 72, is a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. He made a doll of himself, he said, not because he attended an Indian boarding school — he didn’t, but his father and grandparents did — but because he wanted to symbolize what he sees as the need for American Indians “to put down our warrior mentality” and “find a way to deal with what’s going on in a positive way.”

Among American Indians, seeking information in order to understand the history of the Indian boarding school era is largely accepted as the first step toward healing and justice.

The discovery in May 2021 of about 200 unmarked graves on the campus of long-closed Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia has drawn attention to the history of Indian boarding schools in Canada as well as the United States, where the practice began in the 19th century.

The Kamloops discoveries prompted the U.S. Department of the Interior to launch in June the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, described as “a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies.” A report was due April 1 to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, and it is expected to be released to the public soon.

As the United States begins to confront this chapter of its history, so does the Catholic Church. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) — which has compiled what is generally regarded as the most comprehensive, albeit admittedly incomplete list of U.S. Indian boarding schools — at least 84 of the 367 identified schools were run by Catholic institutions through contracts with the U.S. government. A group of Catholic archivists researching the topic believe there were many more.

Last summer, employees of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis began to look more deeply into what was already known about its involvement with Indian boarding schools, including one it ran in west-central Minnesota in the late 1800s. Efforts are now underway

COURTESY MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A priest poses with children in front of a church at an Indian boarding school in an unknown location, circa 1900. to share archdiocesan records related to boarding schools with the state’s tribal nations.

As Archbishop Bernard Hebda and Minnesota’s other bishops work to form and strengthen relationships with tribal leaders, he asked for prayers so that the Church “might be able to shed the light that we need on the facts of what happened” and eventually create a “mutual plan between tribal leadership and Catholics in our state to respond in some way.”

‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’ As described by NABS, which is based in Minneapolis, the boarding schools were a product of the United States’ Indian Civilization Act Fund of 1819 and the Peace Policy of 1869 to “implement cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children to accomplish the systematic destruction of Native cultures and communities.”

In 1879, Army officer Richard Henry Pratt founded the first off-reservation Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which served as a model for the other Indian boarding schools that would come after. It was Pratt who said the words now considered the shorthand for the government policy: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” For many who are working to promote awareness of boarding schools, that phrase summarizes the schools’ goal: to erase American Indian culture via European American inculturation.

According to historians, children were often taken from their communities through coercion and sometimes force.

Some families lost government rations or were imprisoned for non-compliance.

Some former students report abuse, overcrowding and malnourishment, including at Catholic-run schools, while others say they have positive memories.

Some former students won’t speak of their experiences at all.

Many experts say the schools caused intergenerational trauma by hindering former students’ abilities to have selfworth, form healthy relationships or raise children well, and made American Indian individuals and families

susceptible to addiction and poverty. The schools’ legacy is also interwoven with other government policies to oppress American Indian culture.

Christians of at least 14 different denominations contracted with the government to run some of the schools, NABS states on its website, boardingschoolhealing.org. Other schools were run directly by the government.

According to historian David W. Adams, there were 20,000 children in 25 Indian boarding schools in 1900, and years later, that number was 60,889 — almost 83% of Indian school-age children. It lists 15 Indian boarding schools in Minnesota. About half of those appear to have been run by Catholic religious orders.

Allison Spies, archives program manager of the archdiocese’s Office of Archives and Records Management, says there were more than 15 schools in Minnesota, and she is working to identify those operated by the Catholic Church. Among them was the Catholic Industrial School for Boys at Clontarf in Swift County, about 150 miles west of the Twin Cities. The archdiocese administered the school from 1877 to 1892. Beginning in 1884, most of its students were American Indians.

(See related story “A window into the Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf” on page 11.)

Spies began reviewing the archdiocese’s Catholic Industrial School papers in August, and in November, she joined the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee on Native American Affairs’ Accountability and Healing Project, where she is collaborating with archivists of other Catholic institutions.

She is now coordinating the Minnesota Catholic Conference’s efforts to identify archival information held by the state’s dioceses about Catholic-run Indian boarding schools, and share that information with Minnesota’s 11 tribal nations.

(Editor’s note: This story’s reporter has assisted Spies in inventorying the archdiocese’s archival material related to the Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf.)

That work is the initial outcome of a December meeting between

Federal Indian boarding school policies continued into the 1970s. In the following decades, many former boarding schools transitioned to day schools, including some that today protect and teach Native language and culture. However, many American Indians believe the boarding schools have an outsized effect on their lives today.

Richard Wright, who crafted the red leather doll as a way of reflecting on his response to the boarding school legacy, worked in Minnesota corrections before beginning a career in drug and alcohol abuse recovery. Now an indigenous spiritual health expert at the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis, Wright began his career as a probation officer for American Indians. His roles have given him an up-close look at challenges American Indians face — poverty, addiction, racism, homelessness — and he describes the boarding schools’ contribution to them as “huge.”

“The boarding schools were hard on the American Indian families because they removed Indian children at the age of 5 for the purpose of educating them in a system that was designed for them to assimilate them into mainstream society,” he said. “Our culture was strong back then. We spoke our own language.

We had our own way of raising children, and that was taken away.”

At many schools, the children weren’t allowed to speak their own language or wear their own clothes. Oftentimes, their hair was cut, severing them from an important symbol. “Our hair … back then, means our life,” Wright said. “The longer our hair means that we’ve lived a long time, and we want to continue to live a long time.”

While many boarding school accounts focus on students’ experiences, their parents suffered, too, Wright said. With children away from home, families couldn’t observe and celebrate the traditional rites that marked a child’s growth. That eroded the social fabric of Indian communities, things that encourage families to flourish, he said.

“And when that’s removed, a lot of parents started drinking,” he said. “They had no children. They were in grieving.”

In Wright’s work as an addiction counselor, boarding school often comes up, even for people one or two generations removed from attendance.

“They’re still experiencing the results of what their grandparents experienced,” he said.

He sees it manifest in people not knowing how to manage anger or being harsh with their children’s emotions.

He said one woman told him, “Richard, I don’t even know how to play with my kids. All we do is we sit at home and watch TV together and we don’t talk.”

“And that’s the result of being in the boarding schools because you could not PLEASE TURN TO NEXT PAGE

SPECIAL

10 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE talk unless you were spoken to,” Wright said.

“Not being able to express feelings, not being able to tell somebody, like a parent, ‘Gee whiz, something’s going on with me, mom, that’s making me feel this way.’”

While Wright is working to process the boarding schools’ legacy in a positive way, guided by his knowledge of American Indian traditional spirituality, he knows there are many who are simply angry. Last fall, he was moderating a virtual space for grieving for attendees of an online NABS conference.

What he saw was “anger, a lot of anger.”

And some are angry at their community or even themselves, he said. “How is it that we could not have helped our Indian children?

Why didn’t we take a position back then and say no to the social workers that came for those kids?”

Maryanna Harstad is the program director at Gichitwaa Kateri, an archdiocesan parish established to minister to American Indian Catholics. She was adopted from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe as an infant by a Catholic couple in Minneapolis. When she was 18, she was able to identify her tribe through the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

She went to the Leech Lake Reservation and “just started asking around.” She was able to find her grandmother, who told her about her mother, then living in California. Eventually she connected with her mother, who also told her about her birth father, who was enrolled in the Blackfeet Indian Nation in Montana.

They met, she learned, at boarding school.

Harstad, 62, first learned about the boarding school system as a student in American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota. She later learned that her mother had attended the Indian boarding schools in Pipestone and then Flandreau, South Dakota, for her whole kindergarten-to-grade-12 education.

Harstad said her mother became estranged from her family. Harstad was born when her mother was 24, the second of her five children, all of whom were removed from her mother’s home due to her struggles with alcohol and depression. Harstad thinks her mother’s life may have been different if she had grown up with her family.

In March 2019, Harstad participated in a listening session hosted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Phoenix, Arizona. She was there to present on inculturation of Native practices in Catholic worship based on her experience at Gichitwaa Kateri. But, after the participants finished sharing their prepared topics, the conversation turned to boarding schools.

“It wasn’t the only theme, but there was a lot of interest in it and questions on the part of the bishops and those listening,” she said.

Harstad thinks about the photos some schools used to show the difference they were making — one of the Indian children as they were when they arrived, with long hair and Native clothing, next to one of the children in western garb.

“Here is a set of children as they came to the schools, and here they are in their military-looking uniforms: ‘This is the positive change we made.’ But it was not that. It was children who lost what ‘family’ means,” she said. “They go home for the summer or they go home after school, and don’t even remember their language. They can’t even communicate because they’ve been forced not to speak their language, even among each other. They’re punished. The idea of taking away everything that is Indian takes away that loving home that they have and their understanding of it. That carries forward into how they raise their children.”

Harstad said she would like non-Native Catholics “to try and see the traumatic

legacy of the boarding school era from the perspective of Native people. And I realize that’s a difficult thing. But in any kind of situation, if you try to look at it from the perspective of those who felt the impact, that’s a place with more understanding” than trying to justify those who caused harm.

Denise Lajimodiere, a recently retired associate professor of educational leadership at North Dakota State University in Fargo, has dedicated her research to understanding the history of Indian boarding schools. Her 2019 book “Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors” chronicles the stories of boarding school attendees in their own words, gathered from interviews she conducted of former students living in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Most of them attended Catholic-run schools.

Interviewees describe confusion at being taken from their homes, feeling abandoned by their parents, and the instilling of shame about their culture and language. Some said their parents couldn’t afford for them to return home for school breaks or summers.

Many of the stories describe physical, sexual and emotional abuse, sometimes from the adults running the school — including priests and religious sisters and brothers — and sometimes from other children.

‘It starts with confronting history’ Lajimodiere is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Belcourt, North Dakota. Her father attended the Chemawa Indian School near Salem, Oregon, established in 1880 by one of Pratt’s collaborators. Like many working in Indian boarding school research or advocacy, Lajimodiere calls former boarding school students “survivors.”

“It’s sort of like Holocaust survivors,” she said. “Many of them never told their stories because it’s so traumatizing.”

The Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a Presbyterian minister and director of community engagement and racial justice for the Minnesota Council of Churches in Minneapolis, works as a cultural facilitator to help faith communities confront injustices against American Indians. That includes speaking about Indian boarding schools.

“I have long said that every Native person alive today is no more than three generations removed from a direct ancestor being in boarding school, and I’ve never been proven wrong in that,” said Rev. Jacobs, 45. His grandmother was sent to a Lutheran-run boarding school in Red Springs, Wisconsin.

A member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation in central Wisconsin, Rev. Jacobs said that his grandmother’s father — his great-grandpa — attended that first boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school closed in 1918. Its cemetery includes 186 graves of students who died, as well as prisoners of war held at the school. Last July, the remains of nine of those children were reinterred at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

“There are schools with graveyards attached to them, and that is never right.

There were white people, white kids, who went to boarding schools as well, and when their children died, they were brought home, and they were buried with family. And their family could grieve, and their family could say goodbye. … There’s no justifying this. …

There are children in the ground that were never allowed to go home, that just became stories, wonderings of whatever happened.

And that’s not OK.” For U.S. Catholics, revelations of the boarding school era mean grappling with some survivors’ accounts of horrible treatment

in the schools, including from priests and religious sisters. There is also the question of Christians’ involvement in the first place.

Cathy Chavers, chairwoman for the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa near Nett Lake in northern Minnesota, said she sees religious denominations contracting with the government to run schools as an example of following the status quo.

“Nobody really knew what to do with the Indians,” she said. “They (the government) needed the land, they needed the resources, they needed whatever. And it was for civilization. For the Catholics, they were just going with the flow. … They were going by the direction of the government, and the government wanted to assimilate.”

At Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota, Maka Akan Najin Black Elk works as the school’s executive director for truth and healing. He has become a key voice bridging Native and Church efforts to address boarding school history and legacy.

Red Cloud Indian School was once a boarding school, and Black Elk’s grandfather and great-grandfathers attended the school at that time. Now the school is a Lakota language immersion school.

In an October article in America magazine he co-authored with William CritchleyMenor, a Jesuit seminarian, Black Elk pointed to the research of Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota psychologist who developed a widely adopted model for “historical trauma,” or trauma rooted in unresolved grief that can pass through generations. Resolving this trauma has four parts, she says: confrontation, understanding, healing and transformation.

At Jesuit-run Red Cloud, efforts are focused on the first step, confrontation. And that is where the Church needs to join American Indians, Black Elk told The Catholic Spirit.

“This has been a history that mainstream America has not known about and it has not taught about, it’s not talked about,” Black Elk said. “For Native people, this is not news. It’s not shocking. It’s family history.”

Families’ relationships to boarding schools are complex, Black Elk said, especially as some of the institutions have transitioned from boarding schools focused on erasing culture to day schools focused on preserving it, like at Red Cloud. Some people have positive memories of their boarding school experience, he said.

Black Elk, who is Catholic, said that he sees the Catholic Church trying to “make sense of” the boarding school history.

“It starts with confronting the history,” he said. “It starts with learning about it, knowing about it. It starts with sort of reckoning with that history, especially if you’re doing it for the first time as maybe a non-Native. Then you have to take the time to understand it, understand its impact, and understand why that history is still relevant today and the legacy of it, and also understand the complexity of it, that it’s not a black-andwhite story, but that it takes time to sort of wrestle and chew on all of that.”

Based on its own teaching, the Church should not have gotten involved in running boarding schools, Black Elk said. Drawing from an article published in September in Church Life Journal by Canadian theologian Brett Salkeld, Black Elk said, “We (Catholics) were where we should not have been, running schools that said that Native people had to change their culture in order to be Christian.

We should not have been running schools that took children away from their families, when we believe that parents are the first teacher, even from a theological perspective.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

MARIA WIERING | THE

D. Richard Wright is an expert in indigeno health at the Indian Health Board of Minn longtime addiction counselor, he said he s intergenerational effects of the boarding s his clients and community.

MARIA WIERING | THE

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COURTESY THE REV. JI

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APRIL 28, 2022 • 11

A window into the Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf Archdiocese ran rural Indian boarding school from 1884-1892

By Maria Wiering The Catholic Spirit

“P

arents want him badly” is among handwritten notations in an arrivals and departure record from 1889-1890 from the Catholic Industrial School in Clontarf. From 1884 to 1892, the thenArchdiocese of St. Paul contracted with the U.S. government for the school’s use as an Indian boarding school, drawing students from more than a dozen different tribal nations, particularly in the Dakotas.

Located in west-central Minnesota, Clontarf is now in the Diocese of New Ulm, which was established from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ territory in 1957. Some of the school’s records are held by the archdiocese as part of the personal papers of Msgr. Anatole Oster, the school’s superintendent while it served as an Indian boarding school. The archdiocese and other Minnesota dioceses are currently working with tribal leaders to share archival material related to known boarding schools.

As former Bishop James Shannon recounted in a September 1956 story for Minnesota History magazine, Archbishop John Ireland founded the Catholic Industrial School near St. Paul in 1874 with the goal of training immigrant children in farming and industrial arts. Enrollment was low, so, with the expansion of the railroad, he moved the school across the state to Clontarf in 1877. Franciscans from Brooklyn, New York, came to staff the boys-only school, but it drew no pupils. In 1884, Archbishop Ireland contracted with the U.S. government to board and educate boys from Indian tribes.

According to a school register kept from 1884 to 1891, the school drew students from tribes in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Records show that students’ enrollment was federally funded for three years. The school enrolled around 60 Indian boys a year, as well as some white students, primarily from the Catholic Orphan Asylum in Minneapolis. Most of the students are listed as “half-breeds.” Most of the students are identified as Catholic, with notations on which sacraments they had received.

The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions in Washington, D.C., served as an intermediary between the school and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Catholic Church stopped operating the school in 1892, when the U.S. government stopped contracting with third parties, such as churches, for the operation of non-reservation boarding schools.

Archbishop Ireland sold the school to the federal government, which continued to run the school for six more years, until 1898.

According to an 1888 account of the school from Msgr. Oster, under the terms of the school’s contract, it could enroll students ages 6 to 18 to teach them agriculture, stock raising and “the elementary branches of education.” Some students also learned a trade, he said. (See sidebar “Contemporary accounts.”)

The school was to furnish clothing, board, books, stationery, tools for farm and garden work, teachers and medical care. Msgr. Oster said that the school was run by four Franciscan brothers, two male lay teachers, and four other staff members. In August 1888, Msgr. Oster noted 106 boys at the school, with 69 of them Indians. The government paid the school $100 per Indian student.

Documents held by the archdiocese include students’ names, ages, tribes, father’s name, date of arrival and departure, and sometimes some other notes. They also note if a boy ran away or died.

The register lists 18 boys as having died between 1884 and 1891.

Several of them note consumption, or tuberculosis, as the cause of death.

With the heading “St. Paul Diocese Industrial School of Clontarf,” a stone monument at St. Malachy Cemetery in Clontarf erected during the town’s centennial celebration in 1978 notes the graves of 14 “Sioux and Chippewa Indian youths who died while attending the school.”

Allison Spies, the archdiocese’s archives program manager, said she hopes to work with affected American Indian tribes to answer the question of how many boys died while attending the school and where they might be buried.

Documents in the archives also contain letters between the school and agents for the Bureau of Indian Affairs about the boys and the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Some of them are about boys who are sick, or whose parents want them to return. The letters request permission to send boys home and indicate the school required government funding to pay for those trips.

Spies is currently working on behalf of the Minnesota Catholic Conference to help the state’s dioceses identify and share records related to Indian boarding schools with the state’s 11 tribal nations. She is also working to identify and contact other tribes whose children were enrolled at the Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf and other Catholicaffiliated boarding schools in Minnesota, as well as the religious orders that are known to have run or staffed them.

CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS In September 1885, the Northwestern Chronicle, a Minnesota Catholic journal, wrote a description of the Catholic Industrial School, calling it “an interesting institution — educating Catholic boys.” The somewhat idyllic description noted that the 2,000-acre campus included two large buildings — one with dormitories, classrooms and a reception hall, the other with a kitchen, chapel, refectory, more classrooms and work rooms. The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and agriculture, carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring and other trades.

The boys raised vegetables in a 20-acre garden, grew wheat and oats, and cared for nearly 100 head of stock, 50 hogs and “a well-stocked chicken house.” The author noted plans for cheese and butter-making “on a large scale,” thanks to the gift of a thoroughbred bull to the school by James J. Hill, president of the Manitoba railroad and a frequent collaborator of Archbishop John Ireland. The bakery oven, the Northwestern Chronicle said, could bake 150 loaves at a time.

According to the Chronicle, there were 102 boys at the Catholic Industrial School in September 1885: “a number of white boys and Indians and half-breeds placed at the school by the United States Government.” The article listed boys as being between ages 9 and 20.

The author of the Chronicle report noted that the boys were taught by the Franciscan brothers “who have charge of the institution” and lay teachers. The author commented on the students’ language skills and academic abilities, noting “the Indians all speak some Indian dialect, many of them are well conversant with French, and a majority speak English fluently, which even the youngest seem to learn easily. … They read, those who have been to school for some time, with ease and accuracy. Their pronunciation is good, though the French half-breeds have a slight French accent. Their penmanship is excellent, putting to shame many of the scholars in our public and parochial schools(,) and during a recent examination they performed a number of difficult problems in weights and measures.”

The Chronicle went on to report that the boys also enjoyed and performed well the “duties of farm life … and seem thoroughly at home and contented. The extensive grounds of the institution admit a wide range for the boys, and when not occupied with their studies or work, can be seen scattered all over the prairie, without distinction of race or color, playing marbles, shooting bows and arrows, playing ball and amusing themselves with a number of other games.”

The writer remarked that the Indian students “are irreproachable in their morals. The school, be it understood, is not a reformatory, but, occupying a position between the ordinary school and every day (sic) life, is designed to prepare the boys for earning an honest livelihood.”

The boys (“every boy except one, an Indian, who is a Pagan”) went to confession and Communion monthly, the writer stated, “and from neither the whites or Indians was a single oath or immoral expression heard in the course of several visits made to the institution by the writer.”

The story concluded with a note that the school aimed to increase enrollment, “although the expenses are necessarily large and there is no tuition fee except what is paid by the government for the Indians and half-breeds.” He noted that the school needed a library, and readers were welcome to donate for that cause.

Two other competing accounts of the school ran in the summer of 1888 in the St. Paul Pioneer Express. The first was printed in late July by the paper’s editor, A. Gerardin, and a lengthy rebuttal came in early August from the school’s superintendent, Msgr. Anatole Oster.

Gerardin’s piece, titled “A trip to Clontarf,” called

COURTESY MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Catholic Industrial School at Clontarf is pictured in this undated photograph. The thenArchdiocese of St. Paul ran the school and contracted with the U.S. government to accept American Indian boarding students from 1884-1892. into question the care of the boys, especially in food and cleanliness. He said he was approaching the school when he encountered three children herding sheep. “I asked them how they liked to stay here at school. They answered, ‘Not at all.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Because we do not get food as we do at home.’ ‘Would you prefer being at home?’ Their answer was short and in the affirmative, while tears stood in their eyes.”

Gerardin went on to say that about 20 boys had recently run away from the school and he indicated he talked with three of them “and their stories agree with those left behind.” He went on to say that the school gets government support, “and it would seem that funds should be sufficient to give the children a better bill of fare than bread and syrup twice a day, with soup for dinner and meat but once a week” especially considering the boys’ farm work. “It is a matter which the heads of the church and other proper authorities should investigate.”

In response, Msgr. Oster stated that Gerardin had gone to Clontarf looking for fault and that he “took good care not to find me.” After calling into question Gerardin’s report based on its faulty geography alone, he also said that 11 boys had run away since the winter, and one was sent home for “unruly conduct and bad language.” Of those who ran away, he said, “five Sioux ran away on account of a death occurring in the house, and I understand that it is according to a superstition in their race.”

As for the others, Msgr. Oster said, “Seven more were demanded home by their parents, and after permission had been obtained from the Indian department, they were sent home well clad, their passage paid and with money in pocket for meals on the road. Four more ... were taken home by their fathers who would not wait for the permission from the department which I had asked, but which had not yet arrived; had they waited, the boys would have been sent home without expense to the parents. There are a few whose time has expired” — presumably the students’ three-year limit of government-funded tuition — “and for whom I am daily expecting permission from the government to let them go honorably and comfortably.”

Msgr. Oster said the students eat well — meat once a day — and he provided a list of food and supplies, including 400 pounds of soap, used between April 1 and June 30. As for the boys with dirty and ragged clothes — a description he disagreed with — he wrote, “I suppose your own son never came home but with a clean face, and your good wife was never called upon to mend his clothes after a rough play such as all boys are apt to indulge at times.”

He added, presumably with sarcasm, “In the four years that the school has been in existence our death rate has been 1 and 6-10 percent, a convincing proof that the children are starved, unwashed, miserably clad, etc. Let the unprejudiced reader judge.”

— Maria Wiering

12 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

SPECIAL REPORT

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10

POPE FRANCIS: ‘I AM VERY SORRY’

No. We shouldn’t have been involved, and we were. So how do we deal with that?

“We have to reconcile. We have to make peace with that,” he continued. “We have to acknowledge and recognize the sin that has been committed. I think the Church is trying to do that to a certain extent.”

Brenna Cussen is among Catholics working to help the Church address the boarding school past. A member of the Catholic Worker movement living in southwest Wisconsin, she started connecting with other Catholics interested in the issue in 2020. She met a Jesuit who had formerly worked at Red Cloud, and they formed a small group of Catholics — mostly members and affiliates of religious communities — who met virtually every two weeks to learn about Indian boarding schools, the Church’s involvement and ask what could be done in response.

The discovery of the Kamloops graves moved their work forward, Cussen said, because they no longer had to convince Catholics it was an issue to care about.

“What we had to do is provide education or provide platforms for Native and non-Native speakers who have been working on this for many years,” she said. “By the Church cooperating with this policy, we caused a lot of harm. I feel responsible as a non-Native Catholic to commit to a posture of deep listening, repentance and repair.”

In fall 2021, the organization put on a four-part webinar series for about 800 Catholics, many of them members of women’s religious communities. Speakers included Black Elk; Christine Diindiisi McCleave, then the CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition; and Bishop Donald Bolen of the Archdiocese of Regina, Saskatchewan.

Some Catholic religious orders are already exploring their history of boarding school involvement. The Benedictines in St. Joseph and Collegeville, for example, have already done considerable work to uncover this past and work with tribes it affected. The College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University have a website providing a history of Indian boarding schools they ran through federal contracts secured through the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Those Indian boarding schools include ones that were on what is now their college and university campuses.

The group Cussen helped found is collaborating with the USCCB’s Subcommittee on Native American Affairs under the temporary name the Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project, or AHP, where she collaborates with Spies, the archdiocese’s archivist.

Minnesota is well represented in the AHP, Spies said.

Among its members are Shawn Phillips, director of the archdiocese’s Office of Indian Ministry and the pastoral minister at Gichitwaa Kateri.

Cussen and Spies are on the archives subcommittee that is working to put together an official, accurate list of Indian boarding schools and day schools ever run or staffed by Catholics in the U.S. “No such list exists,” Cussen said. “(NABS) has a pretty good list that they’ve created, but even they say it’s not totally complete or accurate. … We want to find out where all the records for these schools ... are located.”

And that’s a particular challenge, Cussen said. As American Indian leaders call for records’ release, “the problem is a lot of these archives are in multiple, like maybe even hundreds of different locations all across the country. … And sometimes these schools had like five or six different (religious) orders that came in and staffed for a period of time. Each one of these orders will have records pertaining to the school.”

Cussen, Spies and others are trying to speak with religious communities and archivists, “letting them know how important it is to find those records, organize them,” Cussen said, and then collaborate with the impacted Native communities, so that the records, when shared, respect different Native communities’ traditions and wishes. Some may want the documents publicly available, and others may not.

“It’s not as simple as ‘release the records’ — the records are about people’s lives,” she said. “There’s a lot of pain in there. There’s sometimes beauty. Sometimes people just want to see a picture of their grandfather.

As Maka has said, not everybody’s boarding school experience was horrible. Some people have fond

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is advocating for Congress to pass a bill that would establish a Truth and Healing Commission on U.S. Indian boarding school policies, similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada established in 2008 to document the history and impact of its Indian residential schools. The commission was active until 2015, when it released an executive summary of its findings and a list of 94 “calls to action” to heal the relationship between Canadians and indigenous people. No. 58 on that list calls upon the pope “to issue an apology to Survivors, their families, and communities for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools.”

Last month, Pope Francis met with indigenous leaders from Canada at the Vatican. He apologized and told them he would repeat that apology during a visit this summer to Canada. He said he was “deeply grieved by the stories of the suffering, hardship, discrimination and various forms of abuse that some of you experienced, particularly in the residential schools.”

“It is chilling to think of determined efforts to instil(l) a sense of inferiority, to rob people of their cultural identity, to sever their roots, and to consider all the personal and social effects that this continues to entail: unresolved traumas that have become intergenerational traumas,” he said. “I feel shame — sorrow and shame — for the role that a number of Catholics, particularly those with educational responsibilities, have had in all these things that wounded you, in the abuses you suffered and in the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values. All these things are contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church, I ask for God’s forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry.”

— Maria Wiering

memories. So, we just want to communicate that all people’s experiences should be honored, and their privacy. … It’s just going to have to be carefully done.”

Cussen’s research has uncovered evidence of priests who were opposed to the federal boarding school policy and fought against it.

“There were these Catholics who saw it for what it was and tried to oppose it. I’m proud of those people and that’s part of our tradition. Catholics started schools doing education with Native communities long before the U.S. policy started. … There were instances of Native communities asking for Jesuits … (because they were) more interested in culture and communal understanding.”

Larry Martin, an Ojibwe language scholar and professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, said the Church’s involvement in Indian boarding schools is unfortunate and contributed to the loss of Native culture, especially language. However, he said, some Catholic missionaries actively worked to preserve Native language, and their contributions should not be diminished.

Bishop Frederic Baraga of Marquette, Michigan, for example, was a grammarian of American Indian languages.

In 1837, he published a Catholic prayer book in the Ottawa language. He later wrote a grammar book and a dictionary of Ojibwe still in print today, Martin said.

An Indian school in Harbor Springs, Michigan, trained students to be printers, and they published what Martin thinks was the first Ojibwe-language newspaper for a mostly Catholic audience. That press also published a hymnal in 1901 called the “Anishinabe Negamod.”

These contributions have been helpful to Martin, who is Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, and his collaborators working to translate Catholic hymns into Ojibwe for use at Gichitwaa Kateri, their parish.

Archbishop Hebda is familiar with the Harbor Springs Indian boarding school, Holy Childhood of Jesus. It was in the Diocese of Gaylord, Michigan, where he was bishop from 2009 to 2013. It was torn down to make way for new construction, but one room was preserved. Visitors wrote notes about the school on the chalkboard. Some former students shared happy memories, Archbishop Hebda said, and other memories were difficult.

Archbishop Hebda emphasized respecting the fact-finding phase and cautioned against drawing conclusions before more information is gathered.

APRIL 28, 2022

However, he was struck by the story of one woman who came to the Gaylord diocese looking for an Indian school’s records. She said she had lost her identity in the boarding school system, and she was afraid to marry because she never could be certain that the other person was not her brother.

“As I read about these schools and I have a better sense for what happened in these schools, I have a deeper sense of how perplexing her problem was,” he said.

Given the history of Catholic religious orders educating children on the peripheries in the most difficult of settings in the United States and abroad, Archbishop Hebda said he could understand how so many communities of priests, brothers and sisters could have seen running Indian boarding schools as an opportunity for helping “a young person develop his or her skills and … reach his or her potential.”

“Whether that noble desire was something that should have been rethought in light of the repercussions of taking a child away from his or her family, I’m not sure about that. That’s one of those areas where we need a lot more information,” he said.

“It’s not so clear yet whether the Church’s involvement brought Christ’s love into an awful situation or whether it made the system possible.”

In 1975, the Minnesota bishops released a document calling for “dialogue and reconciliation” between the Church and American Indians. While expressing gratitude for the priests, religious and lay missionaries who left their homelands to share the Gospel with Native people, and in many cases aimed to learn Native language and culture, the bishops also stated that “the unconscious limitations of their missionary efforts frequently contributed to the disruption of Indian cultures by undermining the people’s pride in self, community and heritage.” The statement did not specifically mention boarding schools.

Titled “A New Beginning,” the statement, which was prepared by the Minnesota Catholic Conference, called for the Church to reflect on its own attitudes and work for justice for American Indians, and urged Catholic parishes and institutions to educate their members about American Indian culture and needs, and fully integrate their American Indian members, including in their leadership.

The document was the first of its kind among American bishops, Spies said, and she sees Minnesota’s bishops having a new opportunity to lead “positive efforts” as they respond to the boarding school era, especially in this stage of fact-finding and sharing information. Those efforts are the focus before any healing can begin, she said in an interview for “Practicing Catholic,” the archdiocese’s radio program on Relevant Radio 1330 that aired April 22.

“It’s also essential that any efforts toward healing are Native-led,” Spies said. “All of us, including descendants of settlers, need to engage in this work of truth-seeking and healing; we’re all grappling with this colonial legacy of oppression and injustice. However, the right steps toward healing on this issue must be in relationship with, and at the invitation of, the American Indian nations — centered on Native needs and directed by Native voices.”

Following the December meeting organized by the MCC, the tribes’ leaders asked the bishops to make all relevant information available digitally to all of the state’s tribes. Tribal leaders are currently reviewing a drafted memorandum of understanding about how to proceed in sharing that information.

Chavers, the Bois Forte chairwoman, was at the meeting with the bishops. She said she is optimistic about their collaboration, but the fact-finding will take years. She hopes it leads to better education on American Indian history — in schools and in the wider public. She also hopes there will be cooperation for using ground penetrating radar to search for graves around Minnesota’s former boarding schools. “It’s going to take a lot of research,” she said.

Chavers’ grandmother attended a boarding school near Lake Vermilion, an experience she never talked about. She also never spoke her Native language after leaving the school, Chavers said, which is why it was never passed down to Chavers, who grew up just 19 miles from the Nett Lake reservation. Now at age 62, Chavers is working to learn the language her grandmother once spoke.

“Now we’re trying to get that back,” she said.

APRIL 28, 2022

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 13

FAITH+CULTURE Life coach helps Catholics find purpose, create meaningful projects

By Christina Capecchi For The Catholic Spirit

My oldest showed a natural talent in math, then got really into investing. He’s now 18 and he has his own investment portfolio. He wants to go into that. My middle son is great with names and relationships, so I’ve introduced him to the field of human resources. He also loves animals, so he’s volunteering at a veterinarian’s hospital. My youngest has 10 passions and started a YouTube channel.

No one has a job quite like Janae Bower’s.

The 49-year-old mother of three, a member of St. Paul in Ham Lake, is a speaker, a retreat leader and a life coach. She’s launching an online school to help people discover their life purpose — as she guides her teenagers in their decision making.

“Every time I learn something, I have this desire to teach it,” she said. “That’s just my natural bent.”

Q You’ve created some unique

products, like your IT Tribute keepsake, which is available on your website, janaebower.com.

Q You have three sons — two teens

and a preteen — plus a teenage exchange student. Are you constantly buying food?

A I created that in honor of my mother

A I’m going a lot: Costco, Cub, Costco, Cub.

Q As a girl, your dad often told you that God had a special purpose for your life.

A Hearing that message at a young age

was a driving force, and now I see that such a big part of my purpose is helping others find theirs. It planted that seed in my heart.

Q It’s been a winding road — with some starts and stops.

A A decade ago, I had a book and my

FaithWalk retreats and another group I was working with — all these things ready to break through, and instead every one fell apart, and my heart got broken. I thought I would be out there more publicly, but God sent me home.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be — or meant to be in that way. So, I’ve been more secluded and writing. I’m at peace, being here at home. I think God really needed to strengthen my heart and my inner life if I was ever going to have a public, outer life.

Q You help others with their creative projects — writing a book, designing a training program or a retreat, launching a ministry. Tell me more.

A I helped my son’s third-grade class put on a Kindness Fair, and we’re turning that into an e-book. One of my closest friends went through a three-year cancer journey with her mom, and I’m helping her shape a book manuscript. I felt divinely inspired to tell her, “You could write a book about this experience.”

Q Are people too close to see the value in sharing their experiences?

A Yes! I get that spark in my heart. It

feels like the Holy Spirit. I feel called to be at the heart of things at the beginning. It can take a while to process, and sometimes it doesn’t result in what we first expected, but there’s a reason we are called together. I’ve learned to let God lead the way. Surrendering and trusting that he’s here. I’m open. I try not to be the one driving.

Q That takes humility.

A I’ve learned a lot of humility. Even

stuff I’ve created — “Oh, OK, no one’s interested.” I developed a year-long transformational program called “Love Affair With God.” I was super close to getting a publisher 10 years ago, but it never happened. Later, I felt inspired to create little videos about it and put it

DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

online. One year, I’ll work so hard and I get five people to participate in the program. Other times it’ll be effortless.

Last year, 15 people went through it!

I try to respect that divine timing and know it’ll all come together when it’s supposed to — or if it’s supposed to. I tell God, “If you want me to do more, then show me. If not, I’ll let it rest.”

Q How do you pick yourself up when something you put out there fizzles?

A It’s trying to go back to living. Going

to prayer. Then, just having acceptance.

Give yourself permission to put things aside. This year, I have a (high school) senior for the first time. I knew it would be a big year, and a year when I would put some work on hold and be OK with that.

I’d remind myself: In three months, my son is graduating. I’m going to be there either way. Am I going to get stressed or choose to enjoy it and honor him?

I feel like it’s a celebration for me, too: I made it for 18 years with one!

Q Do you applaud yourself for

finishing a project, even if it doesn’t get noticed?

A Sometimes, it’s a huge victory to just

have completed something. My friend wanted a big book launch. Instead, it was just an email. But you have to trust — you got it done. Then, other people will step up and share. It’ll be what it is now.

You can feel grateful and celebrate.

God doesn’t call us to be successful. He calls us to be faithful. I put a lot of work into my Inspired Living Blueprint. It sums up everything I’ve been teaching. And it’s a resource that’ll carry over into my next endeavor, the Inspired U school. Maybe the purpose of my creating that was that I had clarity on it to be able to share it with my sons so they can be the Joshuas and bring it to the promised land, and take these foundational things I’ve been faithful in creating, maybe not successful in sharing.

Q How can we tap into our imagination?

A We have to choose to be creators

versus consumers. When we’re looking at everybody else’s stuff, we’re not keeping any space for our own stuff.

Be around inspired people. Read

inspiring books. Have inspiring conversations. Have quiet time with God. If we’re never quiet or alone, then we won’t hear those whispers of inspiration.

Q How have you guided your sons to

when she was turning 60 and retiring. I thought, “What’s the coolest gift I could give her?” I wrote this poem on how you make a difference and then a friend of mine who’s an artist created the images inside for me. The idea is she could open a book and see how each page was a page in her life on how she made a difference.

You can buy the book and fill it out for someone.

Q How do you see the link between creativity and faith?

find their purpose?

A With God being the creator, creativity

A I’ve coached each of them at

is just an extension of how he’s created us — so unique and beautiful.

Destination Imagination (STEAM programs). I try to tap into their hearts.

At the beginning of the year, they each have a vision board or a dream board: What’s really important to you?

Q What do you know for sure?

A That we are loved and we are meant to be loved — and be love.

A forum series exploring critical needs in our community as well as hopeful solutions

TUE. MAY 24. 2022

in person Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis or via livestream 6:00 PM hors d’oeuvres & drinks

6:30 PM forum begins

BUILDING AN INTERCULTURAL CHURCH Why are intercultural competencies vital for the new evangelization?

“Evangelization loses much of its force and effectiveness if it does not take into consideration the actual people to whom it is addressed, if it does not use their language, their signs and symbols …”

— Pope Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi MODERATOR Most Reverend Joseph A. Williams Auxiliary Bishop, Archdiocese of St. Paul & Minneapolis

PANELISTS Anne Attea – Director of Formation and Social Justice, Ascension Catholic Church Akiko Maeker, Ph.D. – Principal Partner and Coaching Director, Interculturalist, LLC Mar Muñoz-Visoso, M.T.S. – Executive Director, USCCB Secretariat for Cultural Diversity in the Church

To Register www.ccf-mn.org/forums Forums are free. Registration is required.

14 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

APRIL 28, 2022

FOCUSONFAITH SUNDAY SCRIPTURES | FATHER DANIEL HAUGAN

‘Do you have agapé for me?’

The Gospel for the Third Sunday of Easter offers us a deep insight into how much Peter loved Jesus, and how he would be called, in the future, to an even deeper love, witnessing with his life.

This beautiful episode on the shore of the Sea of Tiberius should offer us an insight into how much more we are all called to love Jesus.

I have often pondered the age-old conversation starter, “If you could invite someone from history to breakfast, who would it be?” For many of us, it would be Jesus. Now, imagine Jesus inviting YOU to breakfast! That is what he did to the seven disciples in the fishing boat with Peter in this weekend’s Gospel. After the resurrection of Christ, overwhelmed by everything, Peter said to the others, “I am going fishing.” And they said to him, “We will go with you.” How many of us like them, when overwhelmed, retreat to something that distracts our weary minds? They went fishing, but as usual caught nothing that night. At dawn, Jesus stood on the beach but the disciples did not know it was him. He called to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some fish.” They cast into the deep and were not able to haul in all the fish. Recognizing the miracle, John said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”

Realizing what John said was true, Peter jumped into the sea and swam quickly to Jesus on the shore.

When they all arrived on shore, Jesus said, “Come and have breakfast.” He had prepared some fish and bread over an open fire.

The breakfast with Jesus on the beach that day is a story of Peter’s repentance, but I prefer to see it as his restoration. Peter’s repeated

ASK FATHER MIKE | FATHER MICHAEL SCHMITZ

How can I handle being corrected better?

Q I have to admit that I am not that great at

receiving correction. I get super defensive or I end up feeling really guilty. I sometimes even feel like a failure. What should I do?

A I am so proud of you for asking this question.

Too often, too many of us don’t even care how we receive correction. Even if you find yourself automatically taking a defensive position, it sounds like you know that that is not how we are ultimately called to respond. So, the fact that you want to know how to move forward is a very good sign.

First, I want to acknowledge how you described your initial reaction to correction: defensive or defeated. This makes sense.

It is a version of the “fight or flight” reaction we all have to the presence of danger. We are tempted to either defend ourselves or our actions or we are tempted to give the correction so much power that it overwhelms and defeats us. This is normal. Just like the “fight or flight” response, it is involuntary and amoral. (To say that it is “amoral” means that it is neither good nor bad; it just is.) So, my first counsel is to pay attention to your immediate response, but you do not have to give it more weight than it deserves.

Nonetheless, it can teach us something.

When we pay attention to our gut reactions, we can sometimes gain insight into our personalities and temperaments. This can, in turn, provide some wisdom in how we ought to proceed. For example, if you recognize that your tendency is to immediately argue with the one offering correction, you might soon realize that you will have to actively learn how to listen patiently. If your

answer “Yes, Lord!” to each of Christ’s three questions is a heartfelt declaration of love, not so much a confession of guilt, yet it does connect to Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus on Good Friday.

I am not a scholar, but I was taught that there are interesting uses of the word “love” in this weekend’s Gospel. In English, when Jesus asks Peter “Do you love me?” and Peter answers, “Yes, I love you,” it makes sense. But in Greek, what Peter replies does not exactly respond to the question Jesus is asking. Greek has several words to describe the various levels of love. There is “Storgé,” the kind of love you might have for a neighbor you share a conversation with from time to time. There is “Eros,” a sensual love, a love that draws a couple together and often leads to marriage. There is “Philia,” or friendship, a real and trusted companionship with a person with whom we share true and authentic interests. Finally, there is “Agapé,” which means generous, totally self-giving love, which we treasure and value, even when there is nothing to be gained for ourselves.

Let’s return to the Gospel: Jesus asks Peter, “Agapas me, Do you have agapé for me, do you love me enough to die for me?” As we remember from Good Friday, Peter has not lived up to this kind of love. He had denied Jesus three times to save his own neck. How is Peter to answer Jesus now? He answers, “Philo se. Yes, Lord, I love you as a good friend (but I was unable to risk my life for you last week).” Jesus asks him a second time, “Agapas me?” and again Peter answers at the level of friendship “Philo se.” Finally, unwilling to embarrass Peter, Jesus asks “Are you really my friend?” (phileis me?)

And Peter answers “Lord, you know everything; you know that I am your friend.” In compassion and love, Jesus accepts Peter’s answer; even his friendship (philia) is good enough — for now.

Full and authentic agapé would come many years later for Peter when he would witness with his life for Jesus. He would be crucified, in the shadows of the Vatican Hill, by Emperor Nero. This ultimate sacrifice as a martyr would be the sign of Peter’s authentic agapé, shedding his blood and dying for his faith in, and love of, Christ.

Let us all, for the remainder of Easter, echo what St. Peter tacitly said at the Sea of Tiberius — “I love you, Lord; help my lack of love.”

DAILY Scriptures Sunday, May 1 Third Sunday of Easter Acts 5:27-32, 40b-41 Rev 5:11-14 Jn 21:1-19 Monday, May 2 St. Athanasius, bishop and doctor of the Church Acts 6:8-15 Jn 6:22-29 Tuesday, May 3 Sts. Philip and James, apostles 1 Cor 15:1-8 Jn 14:6-14 Wednesday, May 4 Acts 8:1b-8 Jn 6:35-40 Thursday, May 5 Acts 8:26-40 Jn 6:44-51 Friday, May 6 Acts 9:1-20 Jn 6:52-59 Saturday, May 7 Acts 9:31-42 Jn 6:60-69

Father Haugan is pastor of Holy Spirit in St. Paul.

tendency is to allow yourself to be crushed by even a whiff of criticism, then you may discover that you need to be attentive to your sense of identity and self-worth.

But after the initial response of defensiveness or defeat passes, there is a simple question that needs to be asked.

For example, this happened to me the other day. I had gone to a movie (in the theaters even! Remember that?) and liked it. So, I did something that I do not often do, but I went to Twitter and commented on how much I liked the movie. There were people who responded (as happens on Twitter). Some agreed with me (as happens). Some disagreed (as happens). But one person commented something along the lines of “we don’t need priests giving movie reviews on Twitter.”

Naturally, I immediately experienced the reaction anyone would experience. In my case, I was a little defensive and wanted to post some kind of snarky and superior comment. But of course, I know how Twitter works. I know that nobody wins there. Ever. And I knew that I would certainly not be representing Christ well if I gave in to my impulse to punch back. So, what to do? Well, I asked the one question that always needs to be asked when a person is offered correction: What part of this is true?

That is the question all of us have to ask and answer in order to be able to receive correction well. What part of this is true?

In my case, I very quickly realized that the individual was right: No one asked me to offer my opinion of this movie. No one needs to know what I think about any movie. There was nothing that this person said that wasn’t true. So, there was nothing for me to argue with. I might not have liked being “called out” for sharing my opinion, but that isn’t the issue. I was defensive because I was corrected. It was no more complicated than that.

When I asked the question, “What part of this is true?” I experienced a great deal of freedom. I didn’t have to defend myself, and I didn’t have to feel defeated. This stranger simply reminded me of something true, so I was free to learn from him.

In another case, the person offering correction might be wrong. In that case, the question is even more helpful. “What part of this is

Sunday, May 8 Fourth Sunday of Easter Acts 13:14, 43-52 Rev 7:9, 14b-17 Jn 10:27-30 Monday, May 9 Acts 11:1-18 Jn 10:1-10 Tuesday, May 10 Acts 11:19-26 Jn 10:22-30 Wednesday, May 11 Acts 12:24–13:5a Jn 12:44-50 Thursday, May 12 Acts 13:13-25 Jn 13:16-20 Friday, May 13 Acts 13:26-33 Jn 14:1-6 Saturday, May 14 St. Matthias, apostle Acts 1:15-17, 20-26 Jn 15:9-17 Sunday, May 15 Fifth Sunday of Easter Acts 14:21-27 Rev 21:1-5a Jn 13:31-33a, 34-35

PLEASE TURN TO ASK FATHER MIKE ON PAGE 19

KNOW the SAINTS ST. ATHANASIUS (296-373) This doctor of the Church, famous for his understanding of and writing about the Incarnation, became bishop of his hometown, Alexandria, Egypt, when he was in his early 30s. As metropolitan patriarch for 45 years, he fought the heresy of Arius, a well-educated Alexandrian priest; ran afoul of three emperors and was exiled multiple times; and defended Church unity despite longstanding difficulties with other bishops. He improved spirituality in his diocese, increased vocations, preached and wrote many letters, as well as a life of Antony of Egypt, a classic about ascetic and monastic life. Venerated from the time of his death in both East and West, he is the patron saint of hagiographers. His feast day is May 2.

— Catholic News Service

APRIL 28, 2022

COMMENTARY

environment. New cohorts will start every Earth Day. GUEST COMMENTARY | ADAM FITZPATRICK ARCH 9, 2017 • SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA I encounter many people who are very afraid of

‘Laudato Si’: eal challenges. Catholics are called to respond.

Facing fears honestly, bravely

what the future looks like, particularly as weather patterns get more destructive over time. Last summer’s fires and our own drought followed by periods of torrential rain were frightening to behold.

Young adults talk about climate change frequently, and there is deep frustration that many levels of bureaucracy are not responding. Because young adults see the early signs present and they read the data on future trends, they want an effective response. However, I have felt many times in the Church that reflecting on and being afraid about “Laudato Si’” has changed my our climate is unwelcome or antithetical to being a perception of the world by helping person of faith. I have even been told as much by me be more attentive to how my people who deny climate change is a real issue in the actions and presence affect all of midst of doing my job serving the archdiocese. It is creation. It has inspired me to pay disheartening to me to know that even in writing attention to my consumption, my hops, dynamic Church leaders, andand 1,000+ Catholics from this commentary, there may be unwelcome responses communal involvement, my from people who want their narrative to be the own career hopes and aspirations. r a dayI learned of inspiration and advocacy at our State Capitol. only narrative and oppose any reflection that might how to utilize electric cars and contracted challenge them. to have solar panels builtLearn onto my Popehear dynamic s 22-and-under FREE! theroof. issues, What strikes me in ministry is always the opening Francis’ 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’, on Care for our speakers, and meet your legislators. line of “Gaudium et Spes,” where the Church seeks Common nch included withHome” is a very challenging document, to be in solidarity with the joys, hopes, fears and and as a young adult, I find it resonates with a lot of  See the newly renovated State Capitol! sufferings of the people of God. In our age, climate my experiences as well as my hopes and fears for the change is a great source of suffering, particularly for future. our marginalized populations, and a great source of As the first cohort for the Laudato Si’ Action fear for our young people. Even if we do not agree Platform started on Earth Day, April 22, we are at a that climate change is real, our responsibility is to time as a Catholic Church where we have to embrace be present for the experience people bring forth and the hopes and fears of our young people with journey with them in their own discernment on honesty and bravery, or risk losing them forever. societal issues. My hope for readers is that we can do better as a Church to listen and critically engage with The Laudato Si’ Action Platform is an initiative ARCHBISHOfor P BPromoting ERNARD HEBD A BISHOP ANDour REWown COZZformative ENS narratives so that we can have GLOfrom RIA PU RIVVatican S the Dicastery Integral Black Catholics UnitedDevelopment for Life room to understand the hearts of our young people.

Human inviting Catholics to Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis examine their relationship with the environment as individuals and as a community. The first cohort Fitzpatrick is the social mission outreach coordinator of the Laudato Si’ Action Platform are committing at the Center for Mission in the Archdiocese of St. Paul as either individuals or with their communities to and Minneapolis. Learn more about the Laudato Si’ take steps to improve their relationship with the Action Platform at laudatosiactionplatform.org.

OTECT LIFE & MAN DIGNITY

s is our moment.

Let’s go!

INSIDE THE CAPITOL | MCC

ACTION ALERT

Preferential Lawmakers are attempting to make Minnesota the land of nd register at Catholioption csAtTheCa pitanywhere ol.ogambling rg by allowing sports betting through anytime,

STS:

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 15

for the poor

mobile apps. We must not unleash a new source of addiction and deprivation just so a privileged few can have a bit more fun watching a ballgame. Call your state legislators and ask them SPONSORS: to oppose HF 778/SF 574, the sports betting bill. You can also Politics — the great conversation visit MCC’s Action Center to find ways to get engaged on this about how we order our lives together important issue: mncatholic.org/actioncenter.

— should focus first on meeting the needs of the most vulnerable among us (cf. Mt 25). Thousands of preventative health care. well-meaning proposals have been uSupporting ministry to the homeless introduced by legislators. Limitations Minnesota’s Emergency Services Grant Program on time and resources mean priorities helps shelter providers better respond to the must be set. As House and Senate homelessness crisis. The grants assist those serving committees held hearings to decide the homeless, such as Catholic Charities, as they those priorities, Minnesota Catholic Conference advocated for two important proposals that would show guide their clients to the services they need to overcome chronic homelessness, such as employment a “preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.” counseling, medical care, substance abuse and uMinnesotaCare for children of undocumented psychological help, and transitional housing. immigrants State funding of the program was minimal in the Like any basic element of life, health care sustains us, past, so that even with the significant investments is necessary for development, and should be accessible made last year, the need is still far greater than the to everyone. Unfortunately, undocumented immigrants in Minnesota are unable to obtain any health insurance, available resources. Therefore, MCC is advocating for a supplemental appropriation for the program (HF 3294/ including MinnesotaCare, a state-subsidized health SF 3143). In many instances, those who suffer from plan designed for low-income people above the poverty chronic homelessness find themselves in that situation line. MCC offered testimony in support of legislation because of a nexus with substance abuse, mental (HF 4307/SF 4013) that would make eligibility for health, and a lack of connection with friends or family MinnesotaCare available to undocumented, noncitizen — not to mention unstable employment. Shelters, children under the age of 19. nonprofits and charitable organizations cannot meet Among other reasons, expanding MinnesotaCare the financial need only through their philanthropic to this population makes practical sense as a matter resources. They must be assisted by state dollars to of prudent stewardship of resources. Currently, the continue their efforts to find creative ways to combat undocumented population is only able to receive care chronic homelessness. Ongoing homelessness in a in emergency rooms, where appropriate treatment state with such fiscal abundance remains a scandal. is legally required — and the most expensive setting of our health care system. This eligibility expansion would allow undocumented children to receive care “Inside the Capitol” is an update from Minnesota in a less costly primary care setting, as well as access to Catholic Conference staff during the legislative session.

CATHOLIC WATCHMEN | DEACON GORDON BIRD

Honoring the greatness, and the greatest, of women

Rumbling and grumbling to lift myself up out of bed one morning, I was trying to achieve that early-riser heroic moment when my wife commented, “You stay up too late.” She was right, knowing that I had a lot of things to get done on this given day. So, I was silent in response, lumbered around getting ready, yet snickering to myself as I couldn’t help thinking of that expression many a man grew up with: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

From what I can gather, the early 1900s expression notes that women often helped men succeed in their lives, but the greatness of women who contributed to that success often went unnoticed.

Whether society has done a better job of recognizing achievements of heroic women — both sung and unsung — I can only hope. Certainly, God has given us the complementarity of the sexes.

Nonetheless, this old cliché came about in my head one dreary morning to remind me that any greatness in our household is due to the prowess of the heroine.

In the coming month of May dedicated to the Blessed Mother, Catholic Watchmen not only want to acknowledge the complementarity of relationships, but especially dedicate prayer time in devotion to Mary, and for the dignity of all women. We are counting on Watchmen and their families to devote prayers and petitions in honor of Mary and for the dignity of women in every country of the world. Furthermore, that both Mary and all women may be honored and respected, and that their essential contribution to the family and to society may be highly esteemed. May dignity, honor, respect and esteem be bestowed upon all women for their diligence, demanding work ethic, sensitivity, and faithfulness to their family, friends and neighbors.

The words and actions of the most powerful woman in the world — our Blessed Mother — exemplify women’s essential contribution at the highest level. There are many devout women who look to her as the par excellence of spiritual motherhood to imitate. As Watchmen in our daily disciplines, we are to similarly emulate and follow the example of St. Joseph as our spiritual father. In a complementarity — “God created mankind in his image” (Gn 1:27) — that commits to providing and protecting a robust life of faith. Mother Teresa noted that “when we stand before God results are not important.” Faith is what counts. Faith in God over success in life is what matters most.

There are many special moments we can show our faith in the coming month during Eastertide.

Early in May this can entail crowning and blessing statues of the Blessed Mother. Throughout the month, we can pray rosaries and novenas for the dignity of life and for dignity of all women. We can chant the Regina Caeli at the hours of 6 a.m., 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. each day, and celebrate feast days including Fatima (May 13), Ascension (May 26) and Visitation (May 31).

On Mother’s Day (May 8), we can honor the glory of home life of the first domestic church and give thanks to our mothers, especially for spiritual mothers, who like Mary help lead us closer to and in contemplating Jesus.

Deacon Bird ministers at St. Joseph in Rosemount and All Saints in Lakeville, and assists with the archdiocese's Catholic Watchmen movement.

16 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

ECHOES OF CATHOLIC MINNESOTA REBA LUIKEN

Differing political views part of parish development in northeast Minneapolis On Aug. 17, 1913, Ukrainian Catholics gathered in northeast Minneapolis to celebrate. After two weeks of delays due to sick priests, Archbishop John Ireland had finally arrived to bless the cornerstone of St. Constantine Catholic Church at Sixth and University avenues. After the formal event, the priests retired to the rectory and the parishioners gathered at a local cultural hall for festivities.

Although the parish was formally part of Archbishop Ireland’s archdiocese at the time, it would soon be under the leadership of the man who stood next to him. The pope had recently appointed Bishop Soter Ortynsky as the leader of

COMMENTARY

APRIL 28, 2022

As a result of ethnic divisions and Cordella’s work, northeast Minneapolis is a neighborhood of ornate churches, many of which reflect the native lands of the people who founded them.

The colorful dome of St. Constantine Ukrainian Catholic Church is an icon in northeast Minneapolis. The current church building was erected in 1972.

Like others in its neighborhood, its predecessor was designed by Polish architect Victor Cordella and built in 1913.

MARIA WIERING | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

Ruthenian Greek Catholics in America.

Ruthenians, also known as Rusyns, are a Slavic ethnic group from the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine. A primary feature of their culture is their Eastern Catholic religion.

These Catholics acknowledge the primacy of the pope, but their Mass is much more like Orthodox religious rites. They also allow married priests.

Bishops from across America had trouble accommodating this deviation

from the Latin Catholic standard.

Archbishop Ireland was not an exception.

The archbishop’s first run-in with the Ruthenians came in 1889. Father Alexis Toth, who was serving as a priest without official permission and as pastor of St. Mary’s parish (at Fifth Street and Seventh Avenue in northeast Minneapolis), had been ordained and taught theology in what is now Slovakia. After coming to Minnesota, he visited Archbishop Ireland to gain his permission to minister as a priest in his archdiocese. Their conversation did not go well.

Father Toth explained that he had been married and widowed before immigrating to America, and Archbishop Ireland believed this made him unfit to be a priest. The archbishop also preferred that new immigrants integrate themselves into the American church. He refused Father Toth’s request.

Father Toth contemplated his options for two years, but ultimately, he and most of his parishioners decided to become an Eastern Orthodox parish instead. Father Toth was eventually named a saint in the Eastern Orthodox church for helping 20,000 Eastern Catholics across America convert to Orthodoxy.

Not all of the Ruthenians were happy with Father Toth’s solution, so in 1902, these families and newer immigrants from the region formed the St. John the Baptist Society in Minneapolis, which would seed a new parish by the same name in 1908. This time, Archbishop Ireland complied. It quickly became

N O T I C E

clear that the parishioners did not all get along, and a divide developed between people with slightly different origins. While they all worshiped using the same liturgical traditions, their political views were different, with Eastern groups identifying more with the fight for a new Ukrainian nation.

This group formed St. Constantine.

This mirrored a national divide that formed a few years later when the church split into two branches. The eastern sector became the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and the more westerly group became the Byzantine Catholic Church. Today, these churches still bear these names and remain fully in communion with the Roman Catholic Church but under different direct leadership.

Despite their differences, these parish churches (and their Polish neighbor, Holy Cross) were designed by the same architect. Born in Kraków, Victor Cordella studied architecture in Lviv.

After immigrating to America, one of his specialties became designing churches for Eastern European immigrants that echoed the styles of their homeland.

As a result of ethnic divisions and Cordella’s work, northeast Minneapolis is a neighborhood of ornate churches, many of which reflect the native lands of the people who founded them.

Luiken is a Catholic and a historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

She loves exploring and sharing the hidden treasures that touch our lives every day.

Look for The Catholic Spirit advertising insert from

THE GLENN HOPKINS in some copies of this issue.

MOVIE REVIEWS TheCatholicSpirit.com

APRIL 28, 2022

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 17

Why I am Catholic Catholic

L

By Rich Mathaus DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

ike many of my friends, I grew up Catholic and went to

Son and the Holy Spirit walking beside them each day of

eight years of Catholic grade school. In many people’s

their life as I feel I do.

eyes, I suppose it would be acceptable to state that I was

It’s not easy to live and be part of this broken world,

influenced and had a heavy amount of “indoctrination”

but God never said it would be. I just know that I must

into the faith and why it was the easy choice.

continue to try and live with Jesus as my example and to

But I have to tell you, it was not quite that easy — not really.

You see, I always felt a spirit inside me in, what I

believed then and still do now, is my soul. I questioned a lot of things as a kid, and I tested the principles and the

“

do for others as he would want me to. I know in my heart and soul that this is the only way to live a meaningful and inspired life that I seek and have been so richly blessed with.

I have had a lot of influence by amazing parents, family

teachings of the Catholic belief structure or dogma. Did

and friends and for some, those examples of God in their

I figure it all out? Nope, but I did learn and grow to not

lives are enough to reinforce Catholicism in practice. But I

I know in my heart and soul that this is the only way to live a meaningful and inspired life …

only appreciate the gift I was given from an early

have the blessing of knowing him personally as well, and

age, but also to realize the mystery and profound

that is rich and peaceful and real.

grace of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ — my savior who died for ME on a cross — as an adult.

Every day I marvel at my faith to believe

Mathaus, 53, is a member of St. Ambrose in Woodbury with his wife, Erin. He is a father of two who works as a wealth advisor. He enjoys bird hunting, fishing, “anything

in someone I’ve never met but whom I am

outdoors, really,” traveling with family, scuba diving and being

incredibly close to in my mind and my spirit.

involved with church activities at St. Ambrose.

I have looked into other religions, many faiths and talked to many non-believers, and I pray for them. Not because they are bad people but because they don’t have the constant companionship of the Father, his

“Why I am Catholic” is an ongoing series in The Catholic Spirit.

Want to share why you are Catholic? Submit your story in 300-500 words to CatholicSpirit@archspm.org with “Why I am Catholic” in the subject line.

18 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

APRIL 28, 2022

2022PARISHFESTIVALGUIDE (Spring & Summer) With warmer weather and low transmission rates for COVID-19 in Minnesota, many parishes are preparing annual festivals.

Those listed below will be held this spring and summer. Watch in late summer for a fall guide to parish festivals. Find this guide online at TheCatholicSpirit.com/festival.

— The Catholic Spirit

Mass under a tent 5 p.m. Aug. 13 and a pork dinner, other food options, the music of G.B. Leighton, adult beverages and activities for kids. Fireworks 10 p.m. Aug. 14, bingo, children and family games, chicken picnic, food court, pull tabs, classic car show, silent auction, classic rock music by Java Soul and Swing Band Saints of Swing. Grand raffle drawing, restaurant raffle and more at 4 p.m. 171 Elm St. mystjoes.me

MAY St. Cecilia, St. Paul — Spring Back Together!

May 15, 11 a.m.–2 p.m. Catered meal, silent auction and calendar raffle. 2357 Bayless Place. stceciliaspm.org

Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Minneapolis — Summer Festival, Aug. 19-20: 5–9 p.m. Aug. 19; 8 a.m.–9 p.m. Aug. 20. Live music and dancing, raffle, games, food and beverages.

1315 2nd St. NE. parishesonline.com/find/ss-cyril-methodius

St. Stephen, Anoka — Spring Fest Raffle and Community Celebration: May 21, 6–9 p.m.

Food, fun and fundraising. $10,000 total in cash prizes. Raffle drawing 8:30 p.m. 525 Jackson St. ststephenchurch.org

JUNE DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

St. Anne-St. Joseph Hien, Minneapolis — Summer Festival: June 17-19, 5–10 p.m.

June 17; 2–10 p.m. June 18; 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

June 19. Live music, food, raffle tickets, drawings and games for kids. 2627 Queen Ave. N. gxannagiusehien.net

Children watch a clown make balloon art during a parish festival at St. Timothy in Blaine Sept. 11, 2021.

JULY

St. Columba, St. Paul — Fun Fest 2022: July 8-10: 5–10 p.m. July 8; 3–10 p.m. July 9; 11:30 a.m.–4 p.m. July 10 with Mass at 10 a.m.

Traditional Vietnamese food, Vietnamese live music and raffles. 1327 Lafond Ave. stcolumba.org

Immaculate Conception, Lonsdale — AugustFest: Aug. 7, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Mass at 10 a.m. Chicken dinner, KC Grill, fresh cookie stand, family fun, kids’ games, bingo, raffle drawings and more.

202 Alabama St. SE. icchurch.cc

Immaculate Conception, Columbia Heights — IC Summer Jam, Aug. 5-7: 4–10:30 p.m.

Aug. 5-6; noon–4 p.m. Aug. 7. Food, raffle, pull tabs, beer and wine tent. Aug 5: Mick Sterling’s Born to Run music of Bruce

St. Patrick of Cedar Lake Township, Jordan — Summer Festival: July 24, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Presents...

N

SFIG N A

AUGUST

Transfiguration, Oakdale — Feast Day Festival: Aug. 6, 2–9 p.m. Food, beer garden, games for adults and kids, live music and more. 6133 15th St. transfigurationmn.org

St. Adalbert, St. Paul — Summer Festival, July 22-24: 4–10 p.m. July 22; noon–10 p.m.

July 23; 11:30 a.m.–4 p.m. July 24. Masses: 4:30 p.m. July 23; 10 a.m. July 24. Traditional Vietnamese food, Vietnamese live music and raffles. 265 Charles Ave. stadalbertchurch.org

ATIO

Springsteen, MSMA car show. Aug 6: Mick Sterling’s From Barry — pop sounds of Barry Gibbs and the Bee Gees. Aug. 7: bingo, children’s games, bake shop, silent auction.

See website for admission fee for Aug. 5 and Aug. 6. 4030 Jackson St. NE. parish.iccsonline.org/summer-jam

St. Raphael, Crystal — Aug. 5-6: 5:30–10 p.m.

Aug 5; noon–10 p.m. Aug. 6. 70th festival with annual softball and cornhole tournaments, roast beef dinner, variety of festival foods, beer tent, live entertainment, raffle, kid’s games, silent auction, bingo and pull tabs.

7301 Bass Lake Road. straphaelcrystal.org

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Minneapolis — OLMC Parish and Deaf Ministry Festival: July 10, 11:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Mass at 10:30 a.m. Celebrate the parish’s Italian heritage and immigration and deaf ministries. Food, drinks, silent auction, raffle and wine pull.

701 Fillmore St. NE, Minneapolis. olmcmpls.org

UR

10 a.m. Mass. Chicken dinner: 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.; take-out until 2:30 p.m. Raffle, cash prizes, kids’ games, bingo, country store, silent auction, pull tabs, snack bar, antique tractors, petting zoo, live music and a baseball game.

24425 Old Highway 13 Blvd. stpandc.mn.org

A Light in the DArkness:

Catholic Education and Today May 7, 2022

Transfiguration Catholic School

6135 15th Street N, Oakdale

TR Rediscovering the Nature of Catholic Education

To register, visit our website at Transfigurationmn.org and choose the “School Website” tab at the top of the page

guest speAkers:

event scheDuLe

Karen Sisson

Catholic Education and the Whole Child

Mass 8:00 AM Continental Breakfast

Father John Paul Erickson

Welcome and Introductions 8:45 – 9:00

The Importance of Catholic Education to the Church

Dr. Naughton 9:00 – 10:15

St. Joseph, Waconia — KC Fun Fest: Aug. 7, noon–3 p.m. Family-friendly summer event with activities for all ages, food and fellowship. Klein Drive Park (also known as KC Park). 9055 Klein Drive. stjosephwaconia.org St. George, Long Lake — Corn Days Festival: Aug. 13, noon–10 p.m. Roasted corn, live music, beer tent, reptile/amphibian zoo, kids games and activities, inflatables, super raffle, variety of food, crafts and merchandise vendors and possibly a parade, 5K and fun run. Mass, breakfast and super raffle drawing Aug. 14. 133 N. Brown Road. corndays.com or stgeorgelonglake.org St. Joseph of the Lakes, Lino Lakes — Summer Festival, Aug. 13-14: 5–10 p.m.

Aug.13; 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Aug. 14. Outdoor 202203-ESE-CS

8:00 AM - 12:15 PM

keynote speAker: Dr. Michael Naughton

St. John the Baptist, Dayton — Aug. 7, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Broasted chicken dinner served 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Raffles, theme basket silent auction, flea market. 18380 Columbus St. sjbdayton.org

Karen Sisson 10:20 – 11:00 Father John Paul Erickson 11:00-11:40 Q&A 11:45 – 12:15

St. Louis, King of France, St. Paul — Family Picnic: Aug. 21, noon–4 p.m. Burgers, chicken, ice cream, children’s games and bingo. Cherokee Regional Park, 700 Cherokee Heights Blvd., St. Paul. stlouiskingoffrance.org St. Genevieve, Centerville — Aug. 21, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Fun, food and friends. Games on the grounds: bingo, cake walk, inflatable obstacle course and more. Food: hamburgers outside. Broasted chicken dinner inside includes dressing, mashed potatoes, vegetables and dessert. Take-out available.

6995 Centerville Road. stgens.org Most Holy Trinity, Veseli — 55th Annual Ho-Down: Aug. 21, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Polka Mass 11 a.m. Grilled pork and dumpling dinner, music by local musicians, games for all ages, country store, home-baked goods including Czech favorites, food, refreshments and raffle. 4939 N. Washington St. mhtveseli.com St. Thomas the Apostle, Corcoran — Aug. 21, 11:30 a.m.–4 p.m. Turkey dinner, music, bingo, farmers market, children’s games, bake sale and more. 20000 County Road 10. saintsppta.org St. Victoria, Victoria — Sunset Fest: Aug. 27, all day. Kickball tournament, food, games, music, Mass and more. Watch parish website for event details. 8228 Victoria Drive. stvictoria.org Blessed Sacrament, St. Paul — Fun Fest, Aug. 27-28: 5–9 p.m. Aug. 27; noon–4 p.m.

Aug. 28. Aug. 27: spaghetti dinner, music, drinks. Aug. 28: food, drinks, music, Take-a Chance, silent auction, book sale and games for all ages. 2119 Stillwater Ave. E. blessedsacramentsp.org St. Luke, Clearwater — Aug. 28, 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Food and beverages, games for all ages, quilt raffle, cash raffle, silent auction, quilt auction, bingo and country market. 17545 Huber Ave. NW. churchofstlukes.com

APRIL 28, 2022

THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT • 19

CALENDAR PARISH EVENTS

WORSHIP+RETREATS

Spring Rummage Sale — April 28-30 at St. Gabriel the Archangel (St. Joseph campus), 1310 Mainstreet, Hopkins. April 28: 9:30 a.m.–7 p.m.; April 29: 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m.; April 30: 9:30 a.m. –12:30 p.m. Clothing, houseware, books, furniture, toys, yard, garden, shoes, holiday, tools, jewelry. stgabrielhopkins.org

Annual May Day Family Rosary Procession — May 1: 2 p.m. Line-up 1:15 p.m. at State Capitol, 75 Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., St. Paul, and process to the Cathedral of St. Paul, St. Paul. Parish banners encouraged, and first Communion attire for first communicants. Those unable to walk are invited to the Cathedral to pray along with the procession. Sponsored by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis in collaboration with Minnesota Family Rosary Processions.

More information at minnesotarosaryprocessions.org and archspm.org/events.

Children’s Clothing and Toy Sale — May 14-15 at St. Joseph the Worker, 7180 Hemlock Lane N. Maple Grove. May 14: 9 a.m.–2 p.m.; May 15: 9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. 40+ sellers. No entrance fee. Children’s clothing, plus toys, shoes, baby items, high chairs, strollers, books and more. Look for the green signs in the area. 50% off on Sunday. sjtw.net/childrens-clothing-and-toy-sale Adoration Chapel Open House — May 14-15 at St. Rose of Lima, 2048 Hamline Ave., Roseville. Celebrate completion of adoration chapel renovations. With refreshments. May 14 after Mass, 5:30–6:30 p.m. and May 15, 10–11:30 a.m. saintroseoflima.net/adoration 40th Annual St. Bonaventure Garage Sale — May 18-21 at St. Bonaventure, E. 90th St., Bloomington.

May 18, preview sale ($1 admission): 5:30–7:30 p.m.; May 19: 9 a.m.–6 p.m.; May 20, half-price day: 9 a.m.– 4 p.m.; May 21, $3 bag day: 9–11 a.m. Proceeds support social justice activities for the broader community. saintbonaventure.org/garage-sale.html Feast of St. Philip Neri — May 26 at St. Mary, 261 E. Eighth St., St. Paul. Evening of worship, fellowship and reflection in honor of St. Philip Neri. 4 p.m. Holy Hour, 5:30 p.m. Solemn Mass, 6:30 p.m. reception and dinner, 8:45 p.m. Compline. Speakers: Father Bryce Evans on “St. Philip Neri and The Evangelization of Culture” and Father Byron Hagan on “St. John Henry Newman: The Church in a Secular Age.” stmarystpaul.org/nerifeast

ASK FATHER MIKE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14 true?” comes back with “It isn’t. It isn’t true.” In that case, we can let it go and not give it permission to affect us.

If it is true, then learn from it. If it is not true, then let it go.

Last thing: There are times when I have been corrected and the person is telling the truth, but I have been so bothered by the fact that I did something wrong that I have found it difficult to let it go

Worldwide Marriage Encounter Weekend — May 6-8 at Christ The King Retreat Center, 621 First Ave. S., Buffalo. Bring back the honeymoon in your marriage. wwme.org Women’s Midweek Retreats — May 6-8, May 10-12 and June 14-16 at Franciscan Retreats and Spirituality Center, 16385 St. Francis Lane, Prior Lake. Theme: “Hope Rising; Revisioning Our Dream.” Scheduled time, open time, confession, anointing, Mass, Holy Hour and prayer. franciscanretreats.net “Hope Day — Dealing with Loss, Finding a Reason to Hope” — May 19: 9 a.m.–3 p.m., Christ the King Retreat Center, 621 First Ave. S., Buffalo. Lunch will be served. Registration required. Suggested offering $50. kingshouse.com Silent Retreat (Men and Women) — June 23-26 at Franciscan Retreats and Spirituality Center, 16385 St. Francis Lane, Prior Lake. Theme: “Hope Rising; Revisioning Our Dream.” Scheduled time, open time, confession, anointing, Mass, Holy Hour and prayer sessions. franciscanretreats.net

and move on. You may have experienced this as well. There are times when we have been corrected for something we know was wrong and was our fault. And we may have experienced some inner turmoil because of this.

I have found that those who could be described as “people pleasers” fall into this camp. This could be connected to a vice called “vanity.” As we have said before in this column, vanity is not necessarily thinking highly of oneself.

Vanity is an inordinate preoccupation

Ignatian men’s silent retreat — Thursday-Sunday most weeks at Demontreville Jesuit Retreat House, 8243 Demontreville Trail N., Lake Elmo. Freewill donation. demontrevilleretreat.com

CALENDAR submissions DEADLINE: Noon Thursday, 14 days before the anticipated Thursday date of publication.

We cannot guarantee a submitted event will appear in the calendar. Priority is given to events occurring before the next issue date.

Taize prayer — Third Fridays: 7–9 p.m. at St. Paul’s Monastery, 2675 Benet Road, Maplewood. Simple chants based on Scripture and periods of silence to help participants encounter the mystery of God. Refreshments follow. benedictinecenter.org

LISTINGS: Accepted are brief no­tices of upcoming events hosted by Catholic parishes and organizations. If the Catholic connection is not clear, please emphasize it in your submission.

Included in our listings are local events submitted by public sources that could be of interest to the larger Catholic community.

Order Franciscans Secular (OFS), Third Sundays: 2–4 p.m. at St. Leonard of Port Maurice, 3949 Clinton Ave. S., Minneapolis. Lay Catholic men and women observing the gospel of Jesus Christ by following St. Francis who made Christ the center of his life.

651-724-1348

ITEMS MUST INCLUDE the following to be considered for publication:

CONFERENCES+WORKSHOPS “Laudato Si’” Action Plan conversation — May 3 (in person) or May 5 (virtual). Explore participation in the Vatican’s “Laudato Si’” Action Plan. May 3: 6:30–8 p.m. at Lumen Christi, 2055 Bohland Ave., St. Paul. May 5: 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. via Zoom. Organized by the Center for Mission. For more information or the Zoom link, contact fitzpatricka@archspm.org.

Transformative Education Around the Globe — May 3: 7–8:30 p.m. Online. Women ages 18-45 invited to learn more about the educational vision of the School Sisters of Notre Dame as it relates to ministries around the globe. Information and registration at ssnd.org/events/5-3-22.

OTHER EVENTS Franciscan International Award Dinner — May 5: 6–9 p.m. at The Wilds Golf Club, 3151 Wilds

with the opinion of others. It is good to be aware of and care about the opinion of others (it is what helps us notice other people’s cues and needs). But vanity is caring about other people’s opinions in an outsized way.

To break free of this, I recommend beginning to recognize it and to recognize the source of discomfort regarding other people’s opinions: shame.

Guilt is when I know that I have violated an objective standard. Shame

uTime and date of event uFull street address of event uDescription of event uContact information in case of questions ONLINE: TheCatholicSpirit.com/calendarsubmissions Ridge Court, Prior Lake. Honoring Bolder Options, a youth mentoring organizations led by former Minnesota Gophers and Green Bay Packers football star Darrell Thompson. 6 p.m. social hour, dinner and presentation.

Register at franciscanretreats.net/franciscan-international-award.

Abria’s “Life is Wonderful” 10K, 5K, Walk, Kids’ Dash fundraiser — May 7: 9 a.m.–noon at Lake Harriet, 4135 W. Lake Harriet Parkway, Minneapolis.

Create a team or participate individually. Live DJ, food and fun activities for all ages. supporters.abria.org

is when I know that you know I have violated the standard. Shame is relational; someone else knows. In this case, reconciliation is incredibly helpful.

Reparation and a purpose of amendment is helpful. And above all else, knowing who you are in the eyes of the Father is necessary.

Father Schmitz is director of youth and young adult ministry for the Diocese of Duluth and chaplain of the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

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20 • THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT

APRIL 28, 2022

THELASTWORD

Mark Wahlberg stars in a scene from the movie “Father Stu.” CNS | KAREN BALLARD, COLUMBIA PICTURES

Wahlberg, on interview trail, says ‘Father Stu’ found him, not the opposite

M

By Mark Pattison Catholic News Service ark Wahlberg, the Catholic star of the new movie “Father Stu,” has been hitting the interview trail to support the film. He’s got skin in the game, as he’s one of the movie’s producers, financing “Father Stu” largely with his own money.

Not that it was his idea to make “Father Stu.” Rather, the film found him.

Wahlberg returned to his native Boston to tout “Father Stu” as part of a guest appearance on “The Greg Hill Show” on WEEI-FM. In the April 5 interview that was aired April 6, Wahlberg said he met two priests from Good Shepherd parish in Los Angeles for a 5 p.m. dinner on a Saturday after they heard confessions — “the old guy dinner,” said the 50-year-old actor.

“All of a sudden, Father Ed starts pitching me on this movie,” Wahlberg said. “And I’m (thinking), ‘Why is he pitching me on this movie? Doesn’t he have a job?’ ... It dawned on me this is something I should be paying attention to ... to take Father Stu’s story and bring it to the world.”

Father Stu’s story, in short, is that of an impulsive renegade who quits an amateur boxing career in Montana to become a movie star in Hollywood.

He meets an attractive woman and becomes a Catholic for her.

But a near-death experience convinces him the priesthood is his

true calling. As he nears ordination, he is stricken with an ultimately fatal disorder. But he was ordained nonetheless in 2007 and served as an example of unshakable faith, even in infirmity, until his death in 2014.

In an episode of “Conversation with Cardinal Dolan,” broadcast on SiriusXM’s The Catholic Channel, Wahlberg said: “Probably people thought, what was I thinking? But you know, I prayed about it and every time I did, I just got the affirmation that I need to be making this movie.

This movie is a film that is important.

It’s gonna touch people, and like I said earlier, I think the film chose me.

“So it’s one of those things where I’m like, ‘OK, I’m having lots of success, I have this platform. What am I using it for?’”

In response to an observation by the show’s host, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Wahlberg said Father Stuart Long is still inspiring him long after filming has wrapped on the movie.

“He’s still very much hard at work today and challenging me constantly to do more and to do better,” Wahlberg said. “I’ve got pictures of him ... in my office where I usually do most of my work and every time I glance over, if I’m in a conversation or something, he’ll remind me how I need to be approaching the situation.”

“I’ve always talked about my faith, which is good and fine and dandy and people know that,” Wahlberg told Bill McGarvey in an interview for America magazine, which posted the

article April 6. “But then at the same time, you’ve got to kind of put your money where your mouth is.”

That’s exactly what Wahlberg did after a first script failed to grasp the essence of the real-life Father Stu. He told WEEI he went to talk to Mel Gibson for advice. “Mel had made ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ a love letter to the Lord, so I wanted to get his opinion on what it was like for him — all the pros and all the cons.”

Gibson wound up playing Bill, Father Stu’s dad; Wahlberg said Gibson was his first choice for the part. “So, we attracted the likes of Mel, and Jacki Weaver (as Stu’s mother), and Malcolm McDowell (as his seminary rector). ... They all wanted to bring Father Stu’s voice to the big screen,” Wahlberg said.

Wahlberg said he wanted to capture the kind of family dynamic that is depicted in his 2010 film “The Fighter,” which garnered him a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

“That’s what we were going for tonally (in ‘Father Stu’),” the actor said. “If you could compare it to anything, you could compare it to ‘The Fighter.’ Cause there’s lots of dysfunction, but there’s plenty of humor and heart, and that’s inspiring.”

Wahlberg told America “Father Stu” should appeal to all audiences despite its protagonist wearing a Roman collar.

“Tough grace and tough mercy is what Stu earned through his suffering, and through his work and giving back,” Wahlberg said, adding

He’s still very much hard at work today and challenging me constantly to do more and to do better.

Mark Wahlberg that the movie means to display “the importance of redemption and rooting for people to change and grow as opposed to turning our backs on them.”

Wahlberg said his intent is to “give people hope, and encourage people to pursue their faith, whatever that is.”

And Wahlberg clued in WEEI listeners as to how he gained 30 pounds to show Father Stu gained weight as his muscles atrophied.

“When I did all the weight-gaining for this movie, people thought, ‘Oh, how fun, you get to put on 30 pounds.’ I wasn’t eating Wahlburgers all day,” he said. (The actor and his brothers Donnie, also an actor, and Paul, a chef, own the Wahlburgers restaurant chain.)

“I went to this doctor, who was supposed to be, like, ‘I’m the guy who knows how to do it the healthy way.’ And I was just eating stuff you wouldn’t want to eat once in a day, never mind eating seven, eight times a day for six weeks,” he explained.

The regimen, he said, included olive oil. “You can soak it in rice and all that stuff,” Wahlberg said, “but I just chugged it down.”