In her three years as a reporter for the Catholic Standard, Kelly Sankowski covered cheering crowds greeting Pope Francis at World Youth Day in Panama, and cheering students welcoming Olympic gold medalist swimmer Katie Ledecky home to Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda.

This time, I want to offer cheers to Kelly, for what she’s accomplished for our newspaper, and for what she’s setting out to do. July 1 will mark her last day on our staff, before she begins studying at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, to earn a master’s degree and follow her dream of working in campus ministry.

“I had a really wonderful experience of campus ministry at the University of Virginia,” she said. “I met a lot of really loving people who taught me about the love of God… They encouraged me to use the gifts God has given me.”

At UVA’s campus ministry, she met many people who became close friends, and she met her future husband, Andrew Sankowski, who works as a water resources engineer. During her years there, Kelly went on three spring break service trips, joining other students in doing home repairs for the poor in the Appalachian region of southwest Virginia, Ohio and West Virginia.

Kelly served on the campus ministry leadership team at the university for two years, chairing that effort her senior year and overseeing the planning for liturgies, retreats and service outreach.

When she applied for the Catholic Standard reporter’s position in the spring of 2016, I was impressed by her obvious writing talent and by the fact that she had grown up in the Archdiocese of Washington and knew the area, as a graduate of Our Lady of Mercy School in Potomac and as a member of the class of 2012 at Stone Ridge. Her father, Harvey Seegers, is an associate professor at Catholic University’s Busch School of Business, and her mother, Debbie Seegers, works at the parish office at Our Lady of Mercy.

When we hired Kelly as our new reporter, I joked that I would immediately put her on the Katie Ledecky beat, since they were both Stone Ridge graduates, and Kelly had been a senior when Katie was a freshman there.

Sure enough, our new reporter was at Dulles International Airport as a cheering crowd greeted Ledecky after she had won four gold medals and one silver medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, and then when the Olympic champion returned to Stone Ridge to speak to students at a school assembly.

“I admire her humility, the fact she takes time to come back and talk to students and encourage them to pursue their own dreams,” Kelly said.

At Stone Ridge, Kelly especially enjoyed the school’s social action program, where in her senior year, she volunteered at the McKenna Center in Washington, D.C.

“I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of homeless men who put a face to the issue of homelessness,” she said. “I experienced firsthand their human dignity, which is something I learned in theology class.”

That empathy soon became a hallmark of Kelly’s work at the Catholic Standard. In addition to having skill as a thorough reporter and flair as a creative, thoughtful writer, Kelly’s faith and empathy shined through in her stories, as in her article about how members of St. Rose of Lima Parish in Gaithersburg helped and befriended a Syrian refugee family. In another story, she wrote about how a rural Southern Maryland community offered a hero’s send-off to a boy who had died of cancer.

One of her favorite stories involved profiling women leaders working in the Archdiocese of Washington. “It showed there’s room in the Church for women, and the Church needs our voices and perspectives,” she said.

This past January, Kelly along with our then-photographer Jaclyn Lippelmann had the adventure of covering Pope Francis’s World Youth Day in Panama City, braving the heat, the crowds, and enduring a lot of walking and a lack of sleep as they filed daily stories and photos for the Catholic Standard's website and newspaper.

Along the way, Kelly witnessed the faith of youth from around the world, including those facing challenges in their home countries of Venezuela and Nicaragua.

“The universality of the Church was on full display, and it was so powerful to see so many people gathered together, praying together,” she said.

While working weekdays and on many evenings and weekends for the Catholic Standard, Kelly’s duties included covering the Maryland state legislature and sorting out piles of writings and drawings submitted for our Junior Saints children’s section. She also found the time to volunteer in preparing students for Confirmation at Our Lady of Mercy, and joining her husband in volunteering with the youth group at their parish, St. John the Evangelist in Silver Spring.

“I wanted to share the love of Christ with others in the way people had done for me,” she said. 

Her favorite part of reporting for the Catholic Standard, she said, “has been meeting people who are all living their faith in different ways. They all have different talents, different perspectives, different backgrounds, but they’re all worshiping the same God, and it’s shown me the beauty of the Church when it embraces all of God’s children.”

Now Kelly’s story continues in another medium, but with the same faith and empathy, and we at the Catholic Standard feel blessed to have had her as part of our family. Speaking of her dreams for the future, she said, “I think campus ministry would allow me to help people who are at an age where they are searching for their vocation, (for) what God is calling them to do in their life. I hope to provide them with accompaniment, a listening ear, and hopefully some spiritual direction, so they can be the people God made them to be.”