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students answer call to service as part of christian life

Story and photos by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

Seniors at two of the diocesan Catholic high schools have begun their senior service projects. They have scattered across the diocese and, in fact, to the southern part of the United States and Central America as well.

These young people are being given the opportunity to be of service to others and learn life lessons they could not gain from the classroom.

Students from Althoff and Mater Dei Catholic high schools take the first three weeks of January to experience life in other ways. Students from Gibault Catholic High School will begin their projects later in the spring.

“Year after year, I hear from students who say that the senior service project was ‘amazing,’ that it was ‘the most important thing they have done in high school,’ that it has changed the way they look at other people and the world around them,” John Bouc said.

Bouc is Althoff’s campus minister and works with the project.

“What seems to be the common thread of success for the program overall is when one of our students makes a connection with a person in a different life situation,” Bouc said. “The student recognizes that they care about this person who was once a stranger, and they can, and must try to make a difference in that person’s life.”

To that end, 19 students from Althoff are traveling to Honduras to work with the School Sisters of Notre Dame who have an orphanage there, and in other projects, for 10 days of their service.
They will be accompanied be several chaperones.

Eight students and chaperones from Mater Dei will travel to D’Iberville, Miss., near Biloxi, to do reconstruction work still on-going from Hurricane Katrina.

At Althoff, students have been raising money and collecting donations to take with them to Honduras for their work.
Dustin Hoernis, one of Althoff’s seniors, said this is the third year students from the school are going to Honduras.
Stories of the earlier groups’ experiences have inspired their classmates to continue the journeys.
Hoernis said he expects “to have an eye-opening experience.”

He and the others realize they have so much, and they want to help others “who are less fortunate.”
When he told his parents he wanted to go, they expressed reservations, wanting him to stay in the area. When he told them he would pay his way, they agreed that he could go and bought his plane ticket.

“We’re staying with the sisters, and that’s going to help out,” he said. “I’m not sure what to expect.”
Jenna Smith, also going to Honduras, said she is anxious to go because she wants to help others, but while she isn’t exactly afraid, she also has no idea what to expect.

People at St. Mary’s Parish in Belleville, home to several of the students, told Smith she had “courage” to leave what was familiar to go to another country to help others.

For her part, Smith said she expects “to get a better grasp of what is going on in the world.”
And, as others who will experience the senior service project here and abroad, Smith said, “I know my life will be changed and their lives as well too.”

Phillip Rodriguez said he expects the experience to be “incredible. We take everything for granted here,” he said. “It will be mind blowing.”

The Althoff students expect when they return their memories will affect how they think from now on.
“They will affect my ideas for the rest of my life,” Smith said.

For Bouc, “If everything comes together as we hope, the students realize that the world is much bigger than they are. They see we are actually intimately united to the poor, the distressed, the sick, the aged, the young or anyone in need of compassion and help.

“Hopefully the student finishes with a new sense of dignity for every human being that is immediately consumed by the urge to help.

“When this urge to help is met with the courage to say yes, then the student can no longer make life plans based on profits or material possessions. They are beginning to uncover their own vocation.”

At Mater Dei, Regina Lengermann and Joe Antonacci talked about their trip to Mississippi and their work with the Heritage United Methodist Church.

The church has a “recovery facility” with dorms for volunteers, Antonacci said.
He said they expect to be doing dry walling in houses being rehabbed after Hurricane Katrina that struck the area in August 2005.

Lengermann said she has always wanted to do something like this. “I hope to learn a lot,” she said, and not just about carpentry work. “I hope I can understand what it’s like in places where people have been less fortunate. And I hope I can help them.”

Antonacci said it will give the students some idea of why after more than three years, people are still trying to recover from a hurricane.

“We don’t live in a place with much poverty, not much hardship, and we will get a broader view of what America as a whole” must face, he said.

All of the young people said they were excited about their respective projects — excited to go, to help, to learn, to be changed.

The service projects give all of the students the opportunity to be changed, to explore the broader sense of vocation in the world.

“When it comes to vocations, in the larger sense of our baptismal call to holiness,” Bouc said, “the senior service projects sink an anchor into the heart what it means to be a Christian.”

To donate money to help seniors at Althoff, please call the school at 235-1100. At Mater Dei, please call 526-7216.