By Stephanie Vaccaro, Staff Writer
Bishop David O’Connell of the Diocese of Trenton announced Friday that $1 million of his 2011 appeal will go toward Catholic education, $800,000 of which will be given directly to families requesting tuition assistance for Catholic schools.
The bishop also pledged that the 44 Catholic schools in the diocese will open for the 2011-2012 school year, but said he could not extend that promise beyond next year. Thirty-nine of those are elementary schools, including St. Paul School in Princeton.
”Last year the diocese received tuition assistance requests from elementary school families amounting to over $3 million,” he said. “That was the need, and with the funds that we have available, we were able to fill less than 20 percent of those requests.”
”We are set to launch the annual appeal next weekend across the four counties of the diocese (Burlington, Mercer, Monmouth and Ocean), and I’ve asked for an expanded goal to be attached to the bishop’s appeal,” said Bishop O’Connell, who assumed the role of bishop in Trenton in December 2010. “A goal of $1 million to be used specifically for Catholic education.”
”Through this Bishop’s Appeal and through this special target, we aim to put 80 percen t of the new expanded goal directly into the hands of those parents who seek tuition assistance for our Catholic schools,” he said. “And if we meet our $1 million goal, the tuition assistance fund will have an additional $800,000 to distribute to families.”
”We’re doing this for our students,” he said. “Our students need it, our students deserve it. And we want to make sure that our church, our faith continues to grow and take root from the youngest to the oldest among us in the diocese.”
”This year, in acknowledgement of the growing responsibility we have, all of us, to support Catholic education, we’ve selected a theme taken from the Gospel, and the theme is ‘go teach,’” he said.
To be Catholic is to teach, he said.
”Probably the greatest concern for me is the handing on of our Catholic faith, and to hand it on well so the next generation and the generation after that not only can understand what it is that we believe, but can speak to it, not only that they understand it but that they can talk about it in an intelligible way so that others can understand what it means to be Catholic,” he said.
”In every single instance,” Bishop O’Connell said of his visits to schools around the diocese, “I’ve been tremendously impressed by the faculty and the staff, by the generosity and by the commitment, but also by the students, and especially by the students when you see the results of the work that’s done by some of them it’s beautiful.”
