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Mercy of God will be taught, lived in Catholic schools

Service projects, pilgrimages and special prayers planned for Year of Mercy

Published: November 17, 2015   

By Aprille Hanson
Associate Editor

Our Lady of Fatima junior high students Hayden Shillcutt, Gavin Nowack and John Paul Farley assist younger students as they write their names, prayers and best wishes on 2 by 4s to be used in a local Habitat for Humanity building project.

Children in Arkansas Catholic schools learn about various teachings of the faith throughout the school year, but 2016 will bring a new emphasis — mercy.

In March, Pope Francis announced the Holy Year of Mercy is an extraordinary jubilee to emphasis the Church’s “mission to be a witness of mercy,” according to a Catholic News Service article.

“Children need mercy too,” said Paige Coppola, vice principal of Christ the King School in Little Rock. “Every day in our school we see the way they interact with each other. We always remind them is that the way Jesus would want us to handle it? … They have to learn (mercy) when they’re very young.”

The Year of Mercy, which runs from Dec. 8 to Nov. 20, 2016, will celebrate many individual jubilee days, including for teenagers, prisoners and catechists.

While some might interpret mercy to mean getting away with things, St. Theresa School principal Kristy Dunn said the Year of Mercy will be a good teaching tool for young people. 

“Mercy does not mean leniency or getting off the hook. The bishops are showing mercy is an action of social justice and charitable work,” Dunn said.

Dunn said her school will use the “Two Feet of Love in Action” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ resource as a guide for events throughout the year that focus on advocacy for important social issues, including the pro-life movement, the environment and helping the poor.

“In the past, and we’ll do it again, we’ve taken our seventh graders to Helping Hand. We’re thinking of starting a peer tutoring program … we’ll have them donate to food pantries,” Dunn said. “We’re getting the kids to be advocates.”

Our Lady of Fatima School in Benton has already started building upon what they’ve been doing the past few years — putting corporal and spiritual works of mercy into action. Each month, a new social action is supported with an offering and activity. The young students have done everything from visiting shut-ins to writing inspiring messages on wooden beams used to build Habitat for Humanity homes.

“They’ve been really enthusiastic, they enjoy doing it. The service projects have been great,” said principal Jan Cash. “We always study the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, so how can we make that come alive? We can do a different work each month.”

Cash said when talking about mercy and how to relate it to the students, she goes back to St. Teresa of Avila’s words, “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours.”

“That’s what we’re called to be — Christ on earth. That’s what I want the kids to remember,” Cash said. “That service is what our Church is about.”

Students at Christ the King School in Little Rock are given “mercy” when it comes to their school uniform. Each student will be given a white T-shirt that has “big gold doors that open on the front that say, ‘The Year of Mercy,’” that they can wear with their uniform throughout the jubilee year, Coppola said.

The school will also have a Year of Mercy bulletin board that will have a different topic each month like “God’s mercy looks like this” and “Being merciful looks like this.”

“They’ll have different sheets that they can fill in,” Coppola said. “We teach the kids about God and this lets us know what they’ve learned throughout their Catholic education.”

While most schools are hosting activities for the students, Ann Canon, principal at Christ the King School in Fort Smith, said it’s also important for the staff to get involved. To help raise at least $500 for a child’s scholarship to the St. Scholastica Monastery’s Benedictine Education Ministry in Guatemala, staff can pay $5 to wear jeans or “dress down” on Mondays. Teachers and students will also help host Mercy Missions, including donating toys for Community Services Clearinghouse.

“That’s part of the reason we integrated that last year,” Canon said of the “dress down” charity days, “is for us to have our own charity and set an example,” she said. “It’s one of our foundations of our Christian faith — we ask God to show us mercy.”

Joe Mallett, principal at St. Joseph High School in Conway, said the school has many service projects planned for the Year of Mercy in the community, but emphasized it’s what Catholic schools should do every year.

“The Catholic school is about your faith and formation first and education but right behind that is service. It’s what we’ve always done,” Mallett said. “When somebody needs help with a service, they think of our kids. It doesn’t matter what it is they (the students) step up and do it.”

The most poignant individual jubilee days for students will be the ones focused on youth: jubilee for 13 to 16 year olds to “profess the faith and construct a culture of mercy” on April 24 and a jubilee for all youth July 26-31 to coincide with World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland, according to CNS. 

Dunn, who taught seventh-grade students for six years, said giving youth individual jubilee days is a “brilliant” idea.

“I think that as teens, because teens are bombarded with so many different messages, they forget they belong to God,” Dunn said. “To let Pope Francis bring that focus on them is a beautiful spotlight for them to be in.”

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