by Antonina Zielinska

The students at Our Lady of Sorrows School, Corona, enthusiastically welcomed their bishop when he came to celebrate Catholic Schools Week with them.

The choir greeted him with song, which Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio told them they performed very well.

“Their singing is wonderful,” said Anthony Biscione, deputy superintendent of Catholic Schools. “It’s nice to hear them sing ‘God Bless America,’ but also to hear them sing in what is for many of them their native language: Spanish.”

The school community also prepared gifts for the bishop. The first was a basket of cooking tools, which the bishop accepted gratefully.

“I like to cook,” he explained to the children, “because I like to eat.”

The students were further able to get to know the bishop during his traditional ‘Stump the Bishop’ session. He told the students he would answer their questions, but he warned them that he knew nothing about the new math so they should stay clear of the subject.

Although the bishop encouraged them to ask questions about religion, many of them were curious to find out about the bishop as a person. They asked him many questions about his own personal interests and history, all of which he answered.

The children learned that the bishop likes to drink water and eat pasta. They learned that he hails from New Jersey and that he was in school for 26 years.

The importance of these questions became clear when one student asked: “What made you want to be a priest?”

The bishop explained that it was the priests that came before him that inspired him to answer God’s calling. It was the priests that he knew personally that showed him the way.

When speaking to the students, Bishop DiMarzio urged them to thank their parents for making sacrifices for them to attend a Catholic school. He also asked them to thank their teachers for guiding them. It is thanks to parents and teachers that they are given the opportunity to go to a school where they are encouraged to grow in faith, he said.

“We need faith to carry us through life,” he told them.

At the beginning of the assembly, Kathleen Bollinger, co-principal, said this is the true importance of Catholic schools.

“What makes us special is that while we are here, we are learning to be good friends to Jesus,” she said.

Not forgetting the relationship the school has helped them develop with God, the second gift the students presented to the bishop was artwork they created to express the Nicene Creed.

Bollinger said that each grade, kindergarten to eighth, worked on a section of the creed and then expressed it in a visual manner. Among the results were books of art the bishop received.

After the assembly, the bishop visited the children in their classrooms. He saw firsthand how the school used a combination of modern technology, such as SMART Boards, along with traditional teaching methods, such as cursive writing exercises, to educate their children.

Having already answered the children’s questions, he took the opportunity to ask his own questions. The students eagerly answered. They explained to him that they use Edmodo, an online networking site to help each other with homework and assignments. Younger students showed him how they use SMART Boards to learn to spell. One of the students even took a crack at trying to explain what the “new math” was.

Biscione said that Our Lady of Sorrows embodies this year’s Catholic School Week theme: Catholic Schools Raise the Standards.

“The theme reminds us that we cannot be a Catholic School without being a school of excellence,” he said. “They are one in the same.”