NOTE: A mother with children in St. Gertrude the Great School sent Bishop Dolan this letter on the Feast of the Circumcision, 2010. (The children’s names have been changed.)
Your Excellency:
After Mass this morning we stopped into the church bookstore. Anna picked out a tiny plastic Baby Jesus (about an inch long) that she just had to have. After we had been home for just a few minutes, she showed me how she had taken a red rose petal she had found in the church vestibule and made a tiny crib for that little Baby Jesus. She had then carefully removed the petals from a white carnation and made a little blanket to cover Him with. It was so beautiful and touching it took me quite by surprise. And the loveliest part was that Anna seemed to think it a natural thing to do; she was happy to have made the nicest little bed she could think of for the Savior.
I wanted to share this with you because I think it is precisely the reason we moved to Ohio to be at Saint Gertrude the Great. [My husband] and I are so thankful to have such a wonderful church and school for our children; to have them surrounded by true Catholic teaching, to see all the splendors of the liturgical year displayed so beautifully before them. In a world where they are constantly bombarded with the ugliness of the world, we are grateful for all the ways in which the clergy (and laity) of Saint Gertrude’s represents for them the goodness of God’s love and the purity of Heavenly things.
In particular we wanted to thank you for the beautiful morning Anna and Tom spent on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (or Holy Incidents as Anna called it). They came home that day just bursting with the news of all the fun activities they had done, the treats they had enjoyed, the stories they had read to them and (most important) the lessons they’d learned about the importance of the day. [My husband] and I are aware of how much preparation such things take and we are thankful for everyone who put in the effort to make it such a nice day for our children. All of these things come together for the little ones in such a precious way; the Baby Jesus would not have been so finely clothed in flower petals had the seeds of such love for Him not been planted in hundreds of little ways before today.
May God bless you and may Our Lady continue to pour forth graces on Saint Gertrude the Great.
[A school mother]