Sunday, January 25, 2026 – The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Today we begin our annual celebration of Catholic Schools Week.
I hope you can stop over to St. Francis de Sales School to take a look around and see all the wonderful signs of what our school and all Catholic Schools offer.
Catholic schools are special places. Many of us who are a bit older will recall the Catholic school environment of the sisters in full habits—or modified, blackboards and chalk, school masses, classroom visits by the parish priest(s), sanitized smelling restrooms, the great school lunches made by the lunch ladies/often our mothers and so much more. Catholic schools had a “feel” to them which is difficult to verbalized but many of us have a sense of what that “feel” is. It is an abstraction. Those of us who in one way or another have been in public schools—good schools— can tell the difference that they do not have that Catholic feel.
I get the same type of feel during the season of Lent. It is a real Catholic thing.
The Catholic school has changed and evolved over the years, but what remains is that Catholic feel.
I believe it was the late Father Andrew Greeley who once wrote that Catholics like being Catholic. And because we have those memories of the schools of our youth, hopefully we have that same feel/pride—about our day-to-day Catholic lives. Perhaps something was engrained in us from those Catholic school days.
I hope my words today are not too abstract and vague, and you can follow them. They do raise an important point, that a huge part of our identity should be based on our faith and what the Catholic Church has taught us. We may have some concerns with the Church and its teachings, which is fine, but we should enjoy being members of the Roman Catholic faith tradition and that identity behooves us to act in a way that promotes the Gospel message—a message our world needs to hear.
As we celebrate Catholic Schools Week in the coming days, let us who attended these sacred institutions offer thanks to God for what they were to us. Let us embody what they taught us and the discipline they instilled. May the Catholic Schools of today offer the same blessing to our young people who now follow this wonderful tradition.