or disagreement with the Church’s teach-
ing on marriage and same-sex attraction.
I do not take it lightly that any one of
them could be the instrument used by
God to evangelize a peer or be a witness
of how a believing Catholic really lives.
Teaching eighth grade religion, I also
have the great privilege of preparing
eighth graders for the Sacrament of Con-
firmation. This school year, I decided to
rearrange the order in which I taught,
moving the focus on the New Evangeliza-
tion from the end of the year to the be-
ginning. With my students immersed in
the message of the New Evangelization at
the start of their school year, I have been
able to continue proposing the end goal
of their Catholic education and Confir-
mation preparation.
These teens know the Church is de-
pending on them, the young, to find new
ways to engage the culture. As I prepare
these young people for their Confirma-
tion, I aim to help them become the
leaders who will build the Kingdom in
their high schools and among their peer
groups. Their intellectual knowledge of
the faith is secondary to their experience
of a real relationship with Jesus Christ
and their constant exposure to other peo-
ple who have that relationship.
At Sacred Heart, I learned the incred-
ible importance of cultivating relation-
ships: when trying to bring others back
to the Faith or help them fall in love with
it for the first time. In the classroom I am
constantly cultivating relationships, the
students’ relationships with Christ, my
relationships with them, their relation-
ships with each other, and their relation-
ships with other young adults who are on
fire with the Holy Spirit.
Sr. Agnes Maria, OP, earned a Master of Arts in
Theology, focusing on the New Evangelization
from Sacred Heart in 2016. She belongs to the
Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eu-
charist, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“These teens know the
Church is depending
on them, the young, to
find new ways to engage
the culture. As I prepare
these young people for
their Confirmation, I
aim to help them become
the leaders who will build
the Kingdom in their
high schools and among
their peer groups.”
Even after acquiring a teaching degree,
our Sisters study at several institutions
in the United States, most often in sum-
mer programs, in areas such as theology,
philosophy, and Catholic Studies. The
chance to study the New Evangelization,
however, was particularly attractive. The
Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of
the Eucharist, was founded in 1997 out
of a prompting and desire to heed the call
for the New Evangelization.
Before studying theology at Sacred
Heart, I taught religion to fourth, fifth,
and sixth grade. It was definitely a change
of pace to be back in the classroom as a
student, and I relished every class. While
studying at Sacred Heart, I lived with a
mission of four sisters in St. Clair Shores.
Since two out of the four of us were stu-
dents at Sacred Heart, our community
life was blessed by discussions related to
our apostolate of teaching and the con-
tent of Sacred Heart classes.
While at Sacred Heart, I was impressed
by how the New Evangelization imbued
every class I took. I was also convicted by
the need to follow the guidance of the
Holy Spirit speaking and acting in the
current culture. The emphasis on the
power of prayer and the expectation that
God will heal or speak or act, encouraged
me to approach prayer with greater faith.
After graduating from Sacred Heart,
I was assigned to teach sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade religion at St. Michael’s
School in Worthington, Ohio, where I
currently live with four of my other sis-
ters. As soon as I learned I would be back
teaching, my mind went to work on how
to bring the New Evangelization into my
classroom and to my students.
I look at the middle school years as an
important time to ignite love for the faith
in students before they enter high school.
From the testimony of my sisters who
teach in high schools across the country,
I anticipate my students will probably en-
counter atheism, relativism, and disregard
shms.edu
23