News
Mary MacKillop's charism alive in Australian Schools
14 August, 2011
Schools around Australia have formalised their connection to Mary MacKillop through their student leadership, teams named after Mary MacKillop or other groups like Mary MacKillop Charism Group or Josephite Ambassadors to name a few.
At Whitefrairs School in South Australia two students from their Young Josephites Group write about their living out of Mary’s charism.
Whitefriars’s Young Josephite group has about 14 students. Every Friday at lunchtime we meet and discuss our ideas on how best we can raise money for a particular project. Throughout the year we will support many different charities or projects.
At the first meeting of the year we reflected on Archbishop Oscar Romero’s ‘being more’ – giving to others in need and Saint Mary MacKillop of the cross – ‘ Never see a need without doing something about it’.
During the year we will knit squares which will be used for blankets for the homeless. We also have raffles for Mother’s day, Fathers’s day and Christmas and sell Jellies and muffins throughout the year. In past years we have given money to Warmun School to help provide some warm clothes for students going to boarding school in the south of Western Australia. We also have sent money to the Mary MacKillop International Mission for works in Peru and East Timor. This year (2011) we are again working to send money to Warmun School to help with the replacement of materials needed to help children with their learning after losing everything in the terrible floods. We also collect pull ‘ rings’ from drink cans to send off for making into artificial legs and arms for people who have lost limbs from land mines.
Being a part of the Young Josephite Group is a wonderful experience and being able to help some of the needy throughout the world is very gratifying.
We speak at assembly to inform the school community of where we are sending the monies raised and why. The school community is very supportive of our efforts as everyone gets behind our projects to make them a success. We are very blessed as young people to know that by what we are doing we can make a difference and touch many people’s lives, even if that is in a small way.
