ACE Advocates News

Rising up out of the industrial landscape of South Bend’s West Side stand two architectural gems: St. Adalbert and St. Casimir. The brick and mortar, the stained glass windows, and the vaulted ceilings of these two Churches emanate beauty, but there is a sense of life, too, that pulsates throughout the buildings. It permeates the parish offices where parishioners come and go, perhaps in search of a quiet conversation with their pastor, Fr. Paul Ybarra. It flows through the halls and classrooms of St. Adalbert Catholic School where the average visitor is greeted with a colorful display of student artwork and the reverberations of children’s laughter. Founded in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by Polish-American immigrants, both parishes have experienced a surge in their Latino populations over the years, with parishioners praying together in English, Polish, and Spanish throughout the week. Beauty and life—apt characteristics for the parishes that Fr. Paul Ybarra, C.S.C. calls “home.” 

Jenny O’Donnell stood in the entrance of St. Adalbert Catholic School, taking a deep breath as she prepared to start her interview with Principal Andrew Currier. As she looked around the school, at the brightly colored walls of each classroom and the hallway bulletin boards plastered with student work, she wondered: Is this where I am supposed to be? Where am I being called?

Dan Reynolds, like most of his colleagues nearing the end of their doctoral programs at Vanderbilt University, has no shortage of things to do. Grant proposal deadlines loom on the horizon, data from his most recent study on high school-level reading comprehension await his analysis, and manuscripts demand his revision. Amid this already full-time juggling act, one that recently earned him the Literacy Research Association’s Student Outstanding Research Award,  Dan and his wife Laura—both graduates of ACE Teaching Fellows’s 13^th cohort—are raising three children under the age of 4 and directing their parish’s Youth Group at St. Ann Catholic Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Moving within and among the worlds of educational research, parenting, and ministry, Dan and Laura can say with certainty that their work is never finished. There is always more to be done. 

Mike McShane, a member of the 14th cohort of ACE Teaching Fellows, never had a “life-plan” per se, nor did he adhere to artificially imposed one-, five- and ten-year goals. Mike’s life seems to instead have followed a series of twists and turns that some would call luck, others Providence. In an age of micromanaging and hyper-planning, Mike takes the opportunities that present themselves at life’s pivotal moments and allows these experiences to form and prepare him for whatever comes next.

As the Catholic Church nears the conclusion of what Pope Francis declared a Jubilee Year of Mercy, Maura Shea is experiencing what she conceives her own Year of Mercy in her English Language Arts classroom. The vast majority of Maura’s 11^th and 12^th grade students are students she taught just one or two years ago, as sophomores. This opportunity—to correct past mistakes, to build upon prior success, and to continue to develop already-formed relationships with her students—is one that give flesh to the words Maura heard Pope Francis utter at World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland, this summer--words about “the gentle and unassuming power of mercy.”