For Catholic Schools Week, principals, teachers and parents wrote reflections about what it means to serve students and families during this time of pandemic.  This essay is by Daniel J. McMahon, the principal of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland.

The High School Principals Association (HSPA) of the Archdiocese of Washington goes on retreat each year in March to pray together and to reflect with each other on our work. It is a time of celebration and unity and joy. 

Part of what makes this noteworthy is that we are not a school system but a coalition of Catholic schools, most administered, run, or sponsored by religious orders, that voluntarily gathers because of the faith that unites us. We might be in competition for students or in athletics or music—but we are bound together by something much stronger. Last year as the date approached and the intensity of the coronavirus outbreak accelerated, we were forced to cancel our retreat scheduled for March 12-13, 2020; this coincided with Governor Hogan’s orders in Maryland.

While we missed our retreat, we began a series of weekly meetings stretching into July at which we prayed together, planned together, and shared ideas and inspiration. It was – and has continued to be – a remarkable journey of caring for our communities: students, parents, faculty and staff.

We shared prayer service plans and ways to honor graduates and make graduation special; we talked about hotlines for students in distress and ways to invite in our incoming students. We looked for chances to continue practicing service, to survey families about needs from technology to food insecurity, we talked about COVID-relief funds and we shared successes and failures. We made and discarded countless plans.

Each school has its own unique charism (and its own geography and political jurisdiction to which it is subject!); but those charisms all serve the Catholic Church. Many of our schools organized special deliveries of diplomas and yard signs to our graduates; we had special pick-ups of materials for our new students. We talked teaching platforms and presentations platforms and we shared leads on purchasing additional cameras, sound equipment; we discussed facilities improvements, training for teachers, and attempts to keep students in community while in a virtual world.

Throughout the spring and through this year we have worked together to take advantage of opportunities for service. At DeMatha, we were really fortunate to participate with Catholic Charities in food distribution programs last April. News of that event inspired several alums to set up food distribution programs using our students and facilities, and we have held three more events this fall. Lots of schools have similar stories.

Students from DeMatha volunteer at a May 2020 Catholic Charities food distribution at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Maryland. (CS photo/Andrew Biraj)

Catholic communities know that truth that “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20), and that it is our responsibility to render Jesus present and incarnate through our actions. There are challenges to doing this virtually but the emphasis that Catholic schools place on relationship building makes us particularly resilient. Our embodiment of the emphasis in Catholic social teaching on the principle of subsidiarity makes us flexible and able to respond to the demands of our communities; our insistence on community makes us responsible to share ideas with others. We are not hoarders, we are evangelists.

I wish we got everything right. We didn’t. No one did. But our faith gives us direction and purpose to face all challenges and to see, in all of our sisters and brothers, particularly the least of them, the face of Jesus.