Parish service blooms at St. Thérèse Academy

By Beth Donze
Clarion Herald
 

When St. Thérèse Academy religion teacher Phillip Garside was looking for regular service opportunities for his “ROSE” students – eight teens from the academy’s high school who are learning through an applied program of classroom instruction – he looked no further than St. Thérèse’s on-campus church: St. Mary Magdalen Parish in Metairie.

“I basically blanket-emailed all the ministry leaders and said if we can help you in any way, please let us know,” said Garside, who sees his ROSE students two to three times a week for the “applied service” component of their religious instruction.

St. Mary Magdalen’s vocations ministry was among the groups responding to the students’ offer of help.

“One of the things they do is to make sure that every day, somebody’s praying for vocations – so, they asked if we could do this once a week,” said Garside, noting that his students took their promise to pray a step further: they wrote a personalized letter to every seminarian in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, complete with a hand-colored picture of St. Charles Borromeo, the patron saint of seminarians.

In addition to assuring the seminarians of their continuing prayers, the ROSE students, accompanied by their teacher, brainstormed what they wanted to communicate to the men in the body of their letters. For example, when Garside canvassed the group for words of encouragement they wanted to pass along, the teens came up with uplifting messages such as “Keep pushing on,” “You can do it” and “You are not alone.” 

When one of Garside’s students mentioned that the black floor-length coat occasionally worn by priests made them “look sharp,” Garside taught the group a new vocabulary word they could put in their notes: “cassock.”

Garside also challenged his letter-writers to finish the following sentence: “Making your life choice a reality …”

Suggested endings for the prompt included “... takes hard work,” “... takes prayer,” “... takes courage” – and, Garside’s favorite – “... makes people happy.”

“‘Making your life choice a reality makes people happy’ – that’s totally true! Their vocation (to the priesthood) is all about making people happy,” Garside said. “That’s the kids in the ROSE program. They’re clever, they come up with really good ideas and they phrase things in a way that’s uniquely interesting. They make you stop and think.”

Care for Creation

Garside also incorporates lots of craft-making into his students’ service-giving. With the needs of St. Mary Magdalen’s vocations ministry in mind, he had them make papier-mâché figures depicting a range of vocations: a priest, a nun, a monk and a married couple.

The teens also made statuettes of their school’s patroness, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which were later auctioned off as a school fundraiser.

“Another idea would be to give (our crafts) to people who might need a lift, or leave them somewhere as a beautification effort,” Garside said.

Along the way, ROSE students are learning about the importance of being good stewards of the environment by repurposing used items such as water bottles and discarded newspapers in their crafting projects. Class members also care for an on-campus herb garden and make seed balls to beautify vacant lots in the city.

“I try to work off of the church’s social justice principles – I relate (the projects) to Laudato Sí,” Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical letter urging people to care for their common earthly home, Garside said. “It’s part of our Catholic tradition for 2,000 years that we are connected to creation, and it’s our job, at least in some way, to know how it works with us and how we engage our environment.”

Altar society helpers

Other parish services performed by the ROSE crew have included filling plastic eggs for St. Mary Magdalen’s Easter egg hunt, writing uplifting chalk messages on the sidewalks leading to church (on Fridays, in advance of weekend Masses) and completing “sexton” tasks such as straightening the pews on Mondays and changing out the missals when the church enters a new liturgical season.

“The altar society is very excited about the help,” said Garside, who hatched a novel plan for reusing the out-of-date missals.

“We recycled most of them at a recycling plant, but then we also took some of the old missals and blended them down to make new paper. I bought a little paper-making kit,” he said. “We used the paper to make Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards.”

Garside’s ROSE students rounded out the school year by assisting St. Mary Magdalen’s respect life ministry. They decorated diaper-collection boxes to place in the church vestibule, learned about the life of St. Margaret of Castello and wrote letters of encouragement to mothers and mothers-to-be served by Catholic Charities’ Office of Pregnancy and Adoption Services.

“Another cool project we did was making manipulatives – fidgets – out of old water bottles for the Loyola University Play Therapy Center,” Garside said.

A NOLA Catholic Parenting columnist who also teaches world history and religion to St. Thérèse’s non-ROSE students, Garside said he is especially excited about the impact his students’ prayers and letters may have on the lives of local seminarians.

“I imagine, in their situation, you have family and lots of people supporting you, but you’re cast into this environment where you’re a little bit isolated,” Garside said. “No matter where you go and what you do as a priest, you’re ‘Father so-and-so,’ and so it’s kind of isolating. We want them to know that people are thinking about them and praying for them and that they’re not alone!”

St. Thérèse Academy’s “ROSE” program, named for the famous floral symbol for school patroness St. Thérèse of Lisieux, is an acronym for Rising with Opportunity, Support and Education.

[email protected]