| 7/27/2010 1:42:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| Archbishop Donald Wuerl addresses Catholic school educators participating in the Bearing Witness program that helps them learn how to teach their students about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Archbishop Wuerl spoke to the educators July 22 as they met at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops headquarters in Washington. |
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Archbishop Wuerl says Bearing Witness Holocaust education program builds understanding
RICHARD SZCZEPANOWSKI
Catholic Standard staff
Catholic school educators participating in a program to learn how to teach about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism are helping to build positive relations between Catholics and Jews and all people, Archbishop Donald Wuerl said July 22.
Addressing participants in the Bearing Witness program, Archbishop Wuerl told the educators they are helping to "raise the level of awareness (of their students) of our positive relations with our Jewish brothers and sisters."
More than two dozen Catholic school educators from the Archdiocese of Washington and five other states gathered in Washington last week to participate in the Bearing Witness program. During nearly a week of professional development, the educators not only learned how to teach about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, but they also explored the history of anti-Semitism, Catholic teachings on Jews and Judaism, and contemporary issues of prejudice.
Archbishop Donald Wuerl said the importance of the program "is found in both its goal and its accomplishments." He said the program helps educators "build on growing mutual Jewish-Catholic understanding."
He told the educators that "none of us is called to settle the world's great issues," but instead individuals are called to make an effort "to build special relationships among people."
The Bearing Witness program was created in 1996 in a partnership between the Archdiocese of Washington and the Anti-Defamation League's Washington regional office. It provides Catholic school educators with training and resources so they can teach their students about the relationship between Catholics and Jews.
At the time of its creation, Cardinal James Hickey, then the archbishop of Washington, said it was his goal to see that the program "excels in helping students understand the true horror of the Holocaust and helps them to overcome anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice."
Over the years, it has grown, and is now jointly sponsored by the archdiocese, the ADL, the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Participation in the program has also grown. Archdiocesan educators are now joined by their counterparts from throughout Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, Minnesota and Missouri. For five days, the educators meet in Washington to receive training and resources so that they can share the lessons of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and modern-day prejudice with their students.
Similar programs have begun in other parts of the country, and two years ago, the Bearing Witness program was presented with the NCEA's President's Award. In the past the past 14 years, Bearing Witness has trained more than 1,300 Catholic school educators nationwide, impacting 195,000 students across the country. The program is open to Catholic high school and middle teachers of history, religion, social studies, and English, as well as administrators and librarians.
"This is one of my favorite programs," said Dan Curtin, the NCEA's executive director of the department of chief administrators of Catholic education who served as secretary for education for the Archdiocese of Washington when the program was created. "It's so nice to see something that we started some time ago is still in existence."
This year's program in Washington was held from July 18-22.
During the week, Catholic educators ate a traditional sabbath dinner at a synagogue, learned about Jewish beliefs and practices from a rabbi, toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, met with Archbishop Wuerl at the USCCB headquarters and met Holocaust survivor Halina Peabody.
Jason DeLucco, the dean of faculty at St. Mary's Ryken High School in Leonardtown, said that through his participation in the program this year, "I not only learned, but I experienced. That's the same thing we want from our students - to learn and to experience."
DeLucco, who annually brings his students from Southern Maryland to Washington to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, added that "our jobs as educators are to be the vessels to pass this information on."
He called his entire program "so very interesting" and said that he learned "there is a Jewish context to what we have been taught."
Elizabeth Burke, the librarian at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, said that she was "happy with the relationship we established with the ADL. That partnership, that relationship is the best way to develop and improve our curricula."
Teaching about the Holocaust in Catholic schools, she added, is vital because "this enables the students to make connections to the world today - from Sudan to Rwanda. If they make a connection, they can make a relationship. Peace begins with a simple relationship."
Burke said "one of the big eye-openers for me," was learning about history of anti-Semitism, "and how it manifests itself in the present day."
"I hope to develop awareness about it (anti-Semitism) by developing a year-long educational display on anti-Semitic propaganda of the 1930s and the anti-Semitic propaganda of today," she said.
Archbishop Wuerl, reminding the participants that "we come out of the Jewish tradition," noted that he has long had an interest in "our religious commonality." While he was bishop of Pittsburgh, he started a program where priests and rabbis gathered for "wonderful and fruitful dialogue." Also in that diocese, he invited rabbis to give lectures to Catholic high school students.
Father Leo A. Walsh, a priest of the Archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska, and the associate director of the Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, also spoke to the participants at the USCCB building.
"What you are doing is so very, very important," he said. "It is an essential part of building up relations (between Catholics and Jews)."
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