November 29, 2009

• High School Benefactor

  You hear from time to time about people giving large gifts of money to colleges, but today I read in my quarterly high school alumni magazine that some alumnus gave $2.8 million dollars to my (and his) high school.  The donor was Mr. Thomas Bellinger, a 1939 graduate of the school.  The gift is supposed to be used as an endowment for instructional enhancements, including technology, audio visual materials, textbooks, faculty, and staff.  This is the largest gift this school has received in its 140 year history.

  This is a big (about 1,500 students) private Catholic high school for boys, and it’s been around for, well, 140 years.  It has many prominent (and rich) alumni, and it just absolutely amazes me that alumni would donate the kind of money they do to that school.  It’s been 44 years since I graduated, and they still include me in that school family with almost daily e-mails, alumni news magazines, opportunities for retreats, opportunities to participate in golf tournaments, fishing tournaments, running events, opportunities to include the names of my faithth departed relatives and friends in their Masses in November, and a host of other things.  If I still lived in New Orleans, I might actually do some of that. 

  The irony?  All of my teachers at that school were men, and all but two were Brothers of the Sacred Heart.  There was none of that famous Catholic guilt taught in that school, and those guys taught us what it meant to be Catholic MEN in service to others.  Salty language slipped from their mouths occasionally, as it does occasionally from mine today (and as it certainly did from the boys in that school when I was there).  But that kind of made them more human, and there were never any inappropriate sexual advances on kids.

  There are only a handful of Brothers at that school today, and the Catholic boys there now are missing out on a deep, rich experience of real men in selfless service to their students and to the Church.  I’m sure this school will continue on for another 140 years, but I suspect it will have to continue without the presence of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart.  And that will surely be a shame.

  ED

  • 12:42 am
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