With Catholic Schools Week set to begin on Jan. 26, Elyria Catholic High School’s Panther Pride was shining as the students, faculty and staff welcomed students from each of the Catholic elementary schools in Lorain County for EC’s traditional All-County Mass.
The Coliseum was near capacity as Father Michael McCandless, vocations director for the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, celebrated Mass. Concelebrating was Father Thomas Sanders, OSB who is student teaching at EC.
Father McCandless talked to the students about his own time spent in Catholic schools -- both grade school and at Archbishop Hoban High School in Akron.
As he reflected upon the Gospel reading for the day in which Jesus picked his apostles, he commented on the fact that the apostles were always with Jesus. They never left his side and Jesus got to know them personally. He knew everything about them; their hearts were open to listening to Jesus and being willing to do what he asked of them. Father McCandless asked the student to think about that.
The more time you spend with someone, the more you both get to know each other. The same is true of teachers and others around you. Sometimes others will see things in you that you didn’t know existed. He cited his own high school experience as an example. When he was a junior in high school, the president of the high school, Brother Ken, stopped him in the middle of the hallway one afternoon and said, “McCandless. Come and see me for a moment.”
When then met, Brother Ken asked him, “Have you considered becoming a brother or a priest?” Father McCandless recalled. “From that moment on, my time in high school became a little bit different,” he said.
Just as Brother Ken had gotten to know him and the apostles got to know Jesus, we want to allow our hearts to become familiar with God’s voice and what he wants from us, Father McCandless said.
A Catholic education allows us to get to know God and become familiar with him, Father McCandless said, adding that a Catholic education teaches both the mind and the heart to become educated. Our hearts become educated because they are taught to be “other centric” and not focused on ourselves, he said.
Father McCandless asked those gathered to look around the Coliseum and “see all the other young men and women who are just like you. Men and women of Christ,” he said. He also asked the students to “take seriously and take time to hear what God is calling you to do.”
EC will host another event for seventh-graders Crash the Coliseum on Feb. 15. For more information or to register, click HERE.