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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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

ONE OF A KIND CELEBRATION 20,000 children celebrate their birthdays in world’s largest one day celebration of its kind. The event, named ‘Every Child’s Birthday’ will take place Sunday, August 15th across six countries globally, and will mark the birthdays of some of the world’s poorest children; many of whom don’t have the luxury of […]