Serving the people of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee
By Ethel M. Gintoft
Special to Parenting
The NFL football game is interrupted with a commercial about - what else? - football. We see the football fan watching anxiously as a field goal is about to be attempted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneer. But, in desperation, the nervous fan does a live freeze frame, drives madly to his church, prays, drives back home, and turns the game on again. Voila! The field goal kick is perfect.
Did his prayer affect the play? Of course not. The commercial was only a spoof. But how about in real life?
Reggie White, it is said, used to pray with his Packers teammates in the locker room before a game. We've also seen after-game shots of him on the field leading some of his teammates and members of the opposing team in prayer. Robert McGinn, sports writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said. "There is a tradition of pregame prayer in all professional sports. Each of the teams has a chaplain of sorts, sometimes a Catholic Mass at the hotel, sometimes an interdenominational prayer service."
How about your athletic youngsters? Do they and their coaches pray before a sports event? Are they praying to win? Is it at all possible that God would heed prayers asking for victory?
Actually, when asked, coaches in Catholic schools here all said the kids are encouraged to pray but not to pray to win.
John St. Peter, co-coach of the freshman football team at Milwaukee's Marquette University High School, was emphatic. "Yes, we pray before the game. We gather together, settle ourselves, and pray the 'Our Father' and also the 'St. Ignatius, Pray for Us.' But we are not praying to win! We pray that we are sportsmen, that we play to the best of our ability, that we will be free of serious injury.
"No, we never pray for victory. That puts God on the spot. God has more important things to do. The other team might be praying to win, too! We emphasize teamwork and being part of something larger than the team or school."
Robert Gintoft coached elementary basketball for seven years at St. Catherine Parish, Milwaukee, 16 years at St. Pius X Parish, Wauwatosa, and three years for the Wauwatosa Recreation Department. He said his Catholic school teams have prayed but they prayed to do their best. "That meant being a good sport, playing as a team and supporting one another. We didn't pray to win."
Gintoft said he was inspired by the example of legendary John Wooden, former head basketball coach at the University of California-Los Angeles, who said to his players, "If you play your best you will be winners, no matter what the outcome of the game. In my mind and yours, if you play your best, you will win." Wooden's teams won 10 NCAA championships in the 1960s-70s. "He was the coach of all time," Gintoft said.
Asked what the free thrower would be thinking when he or she makes the sign of the cross before shooting the ball, Gintoft observed, "I see that much less now. I think it's a kid's naive attempt to pray to do the best, not asking God to take sides, but placing the free throw in God's hands. I think when they do that it takes a little pressure off of them."
The coach of girls varsity basketball at Dominican High School, Whitefish Bay, Wayne Chrusciel, added another dimension. "We do pray before a game," he said, "because I think it's important to take that time to thank God for the ability to be able to play."
After he and the girls discuss strategy, he said, "we gather in a circle, holding hands. First we pray for, say, somebody who's sick. Then we pray the Lord's Prayer. We're taking a moment to remember why we are here. We emphasize priorities, like God, family, school, athletics, in that order. Prayer is a way to focus, to stop and clear the head. Right from there we go out into the court."
Stephen Sievers, who coached basketball at St. Bernard Parish, Wauwatosa, from 1996 to 2000, has strong feelings about the role of prayer in sports. "What (you) should concentrate on before a game is to look to God to give you guidance and help with your fears, master your anger, help you be a good sport, win or lose, and play fairly. I think that's missing these days.
"Parents, too. It might not be a bad idea for coaches to pass a prayer on to the parents, to pray for the referees and for the opponents. Parents are such role models, or can be. (Unfortunately) I've seen parents shout at coaches and referees negatively. There is too much emphasis on winning and not enough emphasis on life like: you keep trying, you don't give up, you do your best. I regret we didn't do more about making those points in prayer with the team ahead of time."
The sentiments about parents were echoed by Fr. Thomas Suriano, former Scripture professor at Saint Francis Seminary, St. Francis, and current pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, Milwaukee. "I think some of the children ought to pray that their parents would act like grown-ups. If I was the father (of a athlete performing), I would not model to the kids, 'Please, God, let Tommy win.' I would make it a teaching moment of how to pray. I would hope that intelligent folks would know that God doesn't care who wins. And I hope my child is old enough to understand that. I'm going to pray (instead) that nobody gets hurt."
Suriano granted that "there is something good about presenting ourselves just as we are in a prayer. It's neat and real. 'Right now, Lord, it's my kid's soccer game. It might be silly. I know the starving in Somalia is a bigger issue, but....' This is how humans react."
Prayer and sports are not a bad mix. Fr. Arthur Heinze, former professor of systematic theology at Saint Francis Seminary and current pastor of St. Mary Parish, Hales Corners, noted that the main character in "Chariots of Fire" was a minister and runner. "When he would run, he said he felt God's pleasure," Heinze said.
"Prayer before a sports event," Heinze continued, "is a call to a sense that what we do with our bodies and the joy of a sporting event speak to a gift of God. It is the human body at its best. We pray that we use our bodies as a praise of God in a team effort, that we draw the best out of each other, almost like the Pauline text, 'Pray in all you do.'"
The sign of the cross is not a magic thing before a free throw, Heinze said. "It's more that I use this occasion to be at the free throw line to give it my best as a praise of God. Robin Yount used to say, 'I tried to bat every time as if it was my last.'"
A positive about kids praying, even about success, Suriano said, is that personal prayer can evolve and as it does it gets more in harmony with God. "It's good when people get to the point that it's God's will rather than my controlling God's will. It's less who wins, more on fair play and team work."
However, Fr. Thomas Fait, currently assisting priest at St. Joseph Parish, Lyons, and former archivist for the Milwaukee Archdiocese, cautions that prayer can become simply a pep rally. That could do damage to what prayer is about, lifting our hearts to God.
Prayer is conversation with God, "but it's not what we say," Fait observed, "It's what God says. The victory is in the gifts God gives us and what we were created with. So what you pray for is the grace to be what God is calling you to be - not something superior to anyone else. If you have faith and if you have this relationship with God, then ask and you will receive."
By Annemarie Scobey-Polacheck
Special toParenting
(First in a three-part series)
MILWAUKEE - Traditionally, Catholic schools have had the reputation of being old-fashioned in a quaint, values-from-a-bygone-era kind of way. After all, the girls often wear plaid jumpers, the boys, neatly tucked-in shirts with collars. The schools generally operate on a shoe-string budget and get by without much of the newer technology of their public school counterparts.
Because of this image, you don't often hear the terms "radical" and "cutting-edge" in the same sentence as "Catholic school." But maybe you should, at least in Milwaukee. Wisconsin was the first state to offer publicly-funded educational choice as an experiment in 1990 to enable children of low-income urban families to attend private, nonsectarian schools.
Since fall of 1998, low-income families in Milwaukee have been able to use state-funded vouchers to send their children to religious schools. To be eligible, a family's income must be at or below 175 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $26,000 for a family of four. Participating schools are reimbursed for the cost of educating the students, up to $5,326 per child.
Only two states other than Wisconsin - Florida and Ohio - have voucher programs for families to send children to private schools, although similar measures have been considered by other states. With about 40 percent of Milwaukee's 9,638 choice students attending Catholic schools in the city, Catholic schools are indeed on the cutting-edge of educational reform - plaid jumpers or not.
But even three years after Wisconsin's Supreme Court ruled to include religious schools in the choice equation, Catholic schools stand amid heated controversy. Supporters maintain that parents have the right to send their children to the school that best meets their child's needs, and critics argue that taxpayers should not foot the bill for religious schools.
While just about every Catholic school within the City of Milwaukee accepts students from the choice program, the schools have varying percentages of choice students. St. Veronica, for example, has a scant 5 percent choice population, while St. Adalbert is 92 percent choice. Catholic school officials look favorably on the choice program, saying that it allows schools to serve families who would not be able to choose Catholic schools without it. About half of all children attending Catholic choice schools in Milwaukee are Catholic.
"We have always had a really good reputation for educating low-income children, and the choice program allows us to educate more of them," commented Maureen Gallagher, director of Catholic education for the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
Gallagher believes local Catholics should take a keen interest in the program whether or not their families are personally eligible to participate.
"It's in the interest of the greater Milwaukee community to educate all children," she told the Catholic Herald. "One of the most important ways to help people out of poverty is by providing them with a strong education so that they are prepared for a good job."
Gallagher emphasized that while the archdiocese supports the choice program, it also has a close working relationship with the Milwaukee Public School system, and that often the two systems work cooperatively.
"MPS is educating more Catholic children than the Catholic schools are," she said. "We want them to be as good as they possibly can be. In addition, we have Catholic teachers, principals and administers working for MPS and we give them our support."
St. Anthony Elementary School, with 322 students who use vouchers, has the greatest number of choice students of any Catholic school in the city.
St. Anthony principal Richard Mason sees the choice program as a way to make education more equitable for all children.
"It gives poor families an option in education they wouldn't have otherwise," he said. "Our tuition isn't expensive, but many of our students would not be able to afford the school if it weren't for choice."
While Mason said he has much respect for public school teachers, he believes that children have different needs educationally, and some who struggle in a public school will thrive in a Catholic one.
"Last year, a boy came to us in fifth grade from a Milwaukee public school," he said. "We accepted him with the understanding that he would really need to work hard because he was only reading at a second-grade level. One of our specialist teachers, Sr. Barbara (Kenney, a Sister of St. Francis of Assisi), worked with him every day. She did an incredible job, and he even went to her house over the summer. He just ate it up. Now he's in sixth grade and reading on a fifth-grade level."
Michael Taylor, principal of Our Lady of Good Hope Elementary School, said that the most common favorable comments he hears from choice parents have to do with the small size of the classes and the fact that teachers are more approachable than they would be in a larger school. The school has 188 students, 54 of whom participate in the choice program.
"They tell me they like the smaller size of the school overall," he said. "They feel it's a more welcoming environment. Many families who came from larger schools say they felt lost in the crowd."
Despite numerous success stories, for schools with high populations of choice students the past three years haven't necessarily been easy ones. While an influx of new students can undoubtedly breathe life into a school, principals say a high number of new students who are unfamiliar with the new school's level of expectations or discipline procedures can cause disruptions.
At Our Lady of Sorrows Elementary School, on the city's northwest side, where just under half of the school's 160 students receive vouchers, principal Patricia Wilkum said the school underwent growing pains when it accepted its first choice students three years ago.
"Before we decided to be a part of the program, people questioned things: Would our standards change? Would there be problems we never had before?" she said. "They were important questions, and when the first choice students enrolled, we did have some problems we weren't ready for."
Wilkum said the difficulty stemmed from getting so many new students at once. She said that when children enter the school as kindergartners, they become acclimated to the rules of Our Lady of Sorrows at the same time as they are having their first experience overall with school. When a student enters the school in an older grade, however, his or her previous school experience has set the tone for academic and behavioral expectations.
"We like to be able to form our students," Wilkum said. "It's harder to do that when they come after fourth grade."
Harder, but not impossible. Wilkum estimated that after about a year-and-a-half of studying at Our Lady of Sorrows, most of the new choice students had adjusted and the accompanying major problems had been ironed out.
"It was difficult for the staff because some of the students were very challenging, but we were able to ride through it," she said.
Our Lady of Good Hope has struggled with similar issues, Taylor said. In fact, because the school enrolled 40 new students this school year, 20 of whom were choice participants, Taylor said he felt there were students who had yet to become completely comfortable in the school community.
"It takes awhile to begin to participate fully in the life of the school," he said. "But I don't see a difference between the new choice and the new non-choice students in terms of adjustment. The struggle has to do with being new, not with being choice or not."
Taylor said that the change has not been easy on the staff.
"Teachers are struggling to find ways to accommodate the different learning levels," he said. "We have more low-achieving kids than we used to and teachers are looking for ways to support them."
Some opponents of the choice program argue that many of these families found a way to send their children to a Catholic school before the choice program began and, therefore, should not receive a subsidy now.
Wilkum, Mason and Taylor disagree with this premise, believing that the choice program provides an important safety net for families with variable incomes.
"If a (non-choice) parent loses a job, or the family loses income, they'll become eligible for choice and can stay in the school," Mason said. "It provides stability for children who might otherwise be pulled from the school if the family's income suddenly drops."
Wilkum said about half of the families participating in the choice program at Our Lady of Sorrows are members of the parish. She said many of them sent their children to Our Lady of Sorrows before choice was expanded to include religious schools.
The Golembiewski family is one such family. Last year, their income was a little too high to be eligible for the choice program, but this year, Jim Golembiewski's company cut down on overtime and they became eligible. Golembiewski said that if the choice program did not exist, he believes that he and his wife would find a way to send their children to Catholic schools, but it would be difficult.
"We believe that a key issue in teaching children is their moral education," Golembiewski said. "In Catholic schools, that's really the core of the teaching. That's what we want for our children."
From her perspective in the center of the archdiocesan school system, Gallagher sees that each child in Milwaukee needs a quality education and believes the choice program allows parents to find the best place for their child, be it a private or public school.
"We have all these kids to educate, and I have never felt like we're in competition with MPS," she said. "We can work together to make sure they all have the best education possible.
(This series on school choice and Milwaukee's Catholic schools will continue in next week's Catholic Herald.)
By Patricia Lorenz
If you have young children, teach children, or work with children in any capacity, it's important to know there are many ways to inspire them to reach not just for the stars but for whole galaxies. I learned some of those ways from a remarkable teacher and one of his students years ago in my hometown in northern Illinois.
Thanks to Mr. Hand's help and guidance, Elwood traveled thousands of miles during the years he was a student. He was even invited to the White House to meet the first President Bush and his wife. The month before that Elwood attended the academy awards ceremony in California and had his picture taken with actors Karl Malden, Tom Selleck and Dudley Moore. The night of the big show Elwood arrived in a limousine, dressed in a tuxedo and met Billy Crystal, Paula Abdul, Dan Akroyd, Steven Spielberg, Jane Fonda, Gregory Peck, Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase and Diana Ross. In other visits to California, Elwood hob-nobbed with writer Ray Bradbury and Mel Blanc, who was the voice of Bugs Bunny, and other cartoon stars.
In 1986, Elwood spent two months with the governor of Illinois learning about state government and getting acquainted with various state representatives. In 1988 he visited Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger, and got to go with the cowboy hero when he was filming a commercial in the northern California mountains. Elwood learned a lot about making commercials and brought back pictures of himself with the "masked man" as proof. In 1989, U.S. Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois took Elwood to a staff meeting in Washington and introduced him to all his friends on Capitol Hill.
In February 1990, Elwood was invited to spend a week with syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck at her home in Arizona. He helped Erma sort the socks when they did the laundry and Erma wrote a column about Elwood in which she said, "How do you tell kids they can be anything they want to be, go anyplace they want to go and turn fantasies into realities?" She wrote about Elwood and how he turned his dreams into realities.
Elwood visited the NASA Research Center in Cleveland and the directors there made a videotape of him as he toured the office of educational programs and viewed the sophisticated outer space machinery.
The kids in Mr. Hand's classroom learned a lot about space travel when Elwood got back from that trip.
In 1991, Elwood was invited to appear in the center ring at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus when it was in Chicago. When he was in New York, Elwood had his picture taken with the crew of "60 Minutes." He also got to meet members of India's parliament.
For a little guy who came from a small town and who couldn't talk, walk, see or hear, Elwood's accomplishments were amazing. Elwood was made of the stuff of dreams. Even though he's the height of an average 10-year-old boy, 4 feet 4 inches tall, he's actually made of polyester fiber-fill, shaped like a boy with a brown wig for hair, a knitted rainbow cap, a red sweatshirt, blue jeans, dirty sneakers and he only weighs 12 pounds.
Elwood became the class mascot in 1980, the year Doug Hand had 21 girls and only eight boys in his class. A neighbor created Elwood to help balance the boy deficit.
During that school year the kids wanted to know about cartooning. So Mr. Hand had them write letters to Chuck Jones in Los Angeles, the cartoonist who developed Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner and Wyle E. Coyote.
They got a correspondence going and at the end of the school year the kids wanted Elwood to spend the summer with Mr. Jones instead of being stuffed in a closet. Chuck Jones thought it was a wonderful idea.
In the fall, Elwood returned with a diary of his yacht trips on the Pacific Ocean, including the day he saw a whale, plus stories about fancy Hollywood parties he attended.
After that, students wrote to people around the world, famous people, politicians, heads of corporations, scientists, NASA, the president of the United States, media people and various writers to see if Elwood could visit them. Almost all responded with a letter. Many could hardly wait to have Elwood visit.
When Elwood returned from his adventures the kids thought, "Hey, maybe I'll go there someday and visit that place. Or maybe I'll learn more about what that person does."
When someone didn't answer one of the children's letters Mr. Hand would say, "You're going to be hurt in life, that's a part of life, but don't stay in your shell or you'll never know what you could have accomplished."
Elwood taught the children that they could build houses, invent things, write novels or cartoons, sing songs, travel the world, meet interesting people, change laws and make dreams come true. The children in Mr. Hand Land learned that nothing is impossible if you believe in yourself.
After all, if Elwood could do it, they could do it! It's a lesson I'll never forget.
Patricia Lorenz shares her art-of-living words at many professional speaking
events and retreats. E-mail her at <patricialorenz@juno.com>)
James Pankratz - Special to Parenting
The new year began with the release of a critically acclaimed mini-epic on the drug trade, a film called "Traffic." The movie dramatizes the connections between suppliers and consumers. The devastation of drug addiction is particularly poignant because the victim is a teen-ager.
In the movie, the teen-age girl's father, played by Michael Douglas, happens to be the U.S. drug czar. His political office doesn't protect him from agonizing frustration and helplessness in the face of his daughter's addiction.
This powerful film educates, but does not preach, about the economic and personal devastation brought about by substance abuse. This is a problem that either directly or indirectly impacts every family in this country.
So what does the real U.S. drug czar think? As part of the transition to a new administration, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Barry McCaffrey, stepped down in early January. Before he did so, he issued a final report on the state of the union as relates to the drug abuse problem.
The good news, McCaffrey reported, is progress due to "an unprecedented five-year, $2 billion anti-drug media campaign." He stated that "use of illegal drugs by adolescents declined 21 percent since 1997."
But he warned about the influx of new drugs, including Ecstasy.
Ecstasy lures youth with the promise of a "feel-good" escape, but also can deliver permanent damage to the brain's neurological functioning along with the possibility of "dropping dead the first time you use it."
He cited a University of Michigan study that reports "Ecstasy use by 10th- and 12th-graders increased 40 percent over the past year while among eighth-graders, use increased 80 percent."
Ecstasy. The name itself is seductive. It promises release, escape - but from what? To answer that question, we need to ask ourselves, what we, as adults, are trying to escape, because our children often are only following our example. Living in the most affluent society in the world, what are we so desperate to flee that we're willing to risk our health and our lives to do it?
The root of much addiction is the belief that "I am worthless." This is more than an intellectual stand. It is a gut-wrenching, pit-of-your-stomach terror, a despair about never being able to amount to anything because all I have to offer is no good. A person oppressed by this self-lacerating view of self desperately wants relief.
Relief from this inner anguish can come fast ... fast ... fast ... from a drug that turns off the self-contempt and the depression. But relief lasts only as long as the high. When the internal anguish returns, it's back to the drug for another high. But this time a little more is required to get the same result, and the next time, a little more. Life begins to revolve around planning to get the next high. This is the self-destructive path of addiction.
Most addicts, particularly children and adolescents, are not primarily self-indulgent pleasure-seekers. Fueling an addiction is a deep, pitch-black abyss of emptiness and despair about the self. The ultimate protection for children is the rock-solid experience of feeling good about themselves. Every person on the earth harbors a deep yearning to be understood and to be loved. As a therapist, I have heard numerous accounts by children and adults who grew up in an atmosphere of criticism and anger. It's a short step from what-I-do-is-no-good to I-am-no-good.
I often say that parents are the architects of their children. I am not referring to personalities, which are determined by the particular blend of genes they inherit, but to how they feel about themselves. As parents, we cultivate our children's positive self-acceptance through our consistently loving attitude communicated by kindness, laughter, praise, and self-control. In short, if our children feel we are glad to have them, they are likely to feel good about who they are.
I do not mean to conclude that all addicts had parents who didn't love them, only that parental love and support for a child provides the best insurance against a path of self-destruction. Sadly even love isn't always a guarantee.
In his final report, McCaffrey came to an important conclusion. He wrote: "America has learned that we can't arrest our way out of the drug problem. We've gone to extremes in limiting judicial discretion and over-relying on mandatory sentences." He then made a plea for shifting the emphasis from punishment to rehabilitation of addicts including "education and job training, parole supervision, halfway houses, and self-help, peer group initiatives."
We can't lecture or punish our children into being drug-free. Only our love can build a foundation of self-acceptance that we can hope will prevail.
(Pankratz is a marriage and family therapist at Catholic Charities' Milwaukee regional office.)
Copyright, 1997 by Catholic Herald, Milwaukee, WI
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