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Walking to Guadalupe CHALCO – Fr. Dan Leary, five sisters from the Sisters of Mary community, teachers, employees, and more than 170 graduates from Boystown and Girlstown communities felt the need to keep things light on their 25-mile walking pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe this past Sunday. So periodically, a single […]

Walking to Guadalupe CHALCO – Fr. Dan Leary, five sisters from the Sisters of Mary community, teachers, employees, and more than 170 graduates from Boystown and Girlstown communities felt the need to keep things light on their 25-mile walking pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe this past Sunday. So periodically, a single […]

Needy’s Story This is Needy’s story in her own words: “My first memories began at the age of four when I saw how my father hit my mother. She did not defend herself. At the age of six I was in kindergarten; one day they brought me home from school because my father had been […]

All to Bring the Poor to Christ Which was the most difficult for Washington D.C. native Venerable Aloysius Schwartz: a) Become the first American seminarian in the history of Maryknoll formation to leave (he considered their missionary work too comfortable) and join an obscure order of missionary priests in Belgium whose charism was to spend […]

Serve the Lord with Joy I recently was given the great grace of attending a pilgrimage with Legatus to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City and then a visit to our own Villa de las Niñas in Chalco, Mexico. As has become customary, visiting the Sisters and the 3,400-plus girls […]

Intangibles of Transformation Recently I was talking with a graduate of the Sisters of Mary school in Mexico. I asked him, “What is the most significant thing the Sisters taught you?” His response surprised me, “To clean.”  He’s been successful in life— following graduation from the Sisters of Mary school, he went on to earn […]

READING THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS In the many weeks spent researching the life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, founder of World Villages for Children and the Sisters of Mary, I had, of course, discovered countless compelling aspects of his personality and priesthood: he had a droll wit, was unbudging on his commitment to prayer, consecrated […]

WHEN A HELLISH SCENE UNFOLDED BEFORE THEM, A TRAIN FULL OF PASSENGERS STOOD STILL Every so often a news story from the culture slips past the inundation of daily news feeds and manages to paralyze us. This particular story, which broke earlier this week in Philadelphia, read like a scene from hell. I am not […]

RESIGNED TO SERVE THE POOR Fr. Al with child wheelchair On a startling autumn morning in 1989, a doctor asked Fr. Aloysius Schwartz (founder of World Villages for Children) to sit down, looked him in the eye, and shared the hard news: the 59-year-old American missionary, in the prime of his astonishing ministry for the […]

“THANK YOU LORD, I NEEDED THAT” On this Feast Day of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, it is good to recall how the Church Doctor and Carmelite nun broke like teams of wild stallions into Venerable Aloysius Schwartz’s (founder of World Villages for Children) soul. In 1945, Al was a precocious 15-year-old, two years […]