Throughout this week, Catholic schools across the nation have been celebrating National Catholic Schools Week with both fun and serious activities. St. Columba is no exception.
Weve had dress-up days: Hawaiian, school pride, decades day one girl came dressed from the 1880s, school Principal Kevin Chick said.
Thursday featured a basketball game pitting eighth-graders vs. the faculty, and Friday included a Mass and carnival to raise money for a mission project.
One highlight of the week was Wednesdays Religion Quiz Bowl, with the Rev. James Koenigsfeld acting as Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek.
Five teams, made up of one member from each of the grades taught at St. Columba, kindergarten through eighth grade, answered questions about the Bible, religious history and the Catholic faith.
Questions were geared to what students have been learning in their religion classes, first with Sister Edith Hauser, who retired last year, and now with Koenigsfeld.
Who were the people who stayed loyal to the church when Henry VIII was breaking away? was the question posed to one eighth grader.
The response of Thomas More came quickly. It took a little longer to come up with John Fisher.
What document guarantees Catholics freedom of religion? Try as he might, the young student couldnt come up with the creed or Bible passage that did so. A bit of a trick question, as the answer was the U.S. Constitution.
Little ones recited the Hail Mary and Our Father.
Slightly older ones came up with answers about saints and parts of the Mass. One young man named all the deadly sins.
Another was stumped by a vocabulary question: What word means yes, I agree? The answer? Amen.
Chick said a recent report on Catholic schools showed that there are 7,094 in America, with about 200,000 educators teaching 2.2 million students.
Catholic schools mean a lot of things to a lot of people, he said. For many, its the parochial education. Others like our high academic standards, moral emphasis, discipline and small school environment.
The countrys changing population is leading to challenges as Catholic schools are serving a wider population of people, he said.
We accept any child who expresses interest in a Catholic education, Chick said. Our students are not exclusively Catholic.
In fact, the national average is that 75 percent of students in Catholic schools are Catholic. At St. Columba, the average is 82 to 84 percent, Chick said.
Were teaching acceptance not tolerance, but acceptance and understanding of all people, he said.
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