Bingo, car washes fund visit to pope
Posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/222626/
Christie Powell yearned for her youth group to see Pope Benedict XVI, but she couldn’t find tickets to any of his appearances during his historic first visit this week to the United States.
“I told the parents and the kids, ‘If you want to take a chance, come along. I don’t have a ticket to anything. We’re just stepping out in faith. ’”
That was about six months ago. This week, Powell will lead a group of 74 youths and adults from Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church and School in the Marche community to Washington, D. C.
In their hands will be tickets to see the man who leads the more than a billion Catholics worldwide.
The Arkansans will be among 6, 000 people who get to see the pope when he visits the campus of Catholic University of America on Thursday evening. They will sit in a select spot in Washington when he takes his last popemobile ride of this trip.
Powell still isn’t sure how it all happened.
She is the youth director at Immaculate Heart Church and religion teacher at its prekindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. Powell has led Catholic youth groups for more than 20 years but has never seen the leader of her faith in person.
“Every time Pope John Paul II would come to the United States, I wouldn’t go because I didn’t have a ticket,” she said. “And every time, someone would come back and tell me, ‘ We didn’t have a ticket, but we were within 3 feet of him. ’”
She was determined not to miss out again. When the Vatican announced the pontiff’s visit last November, she immediately set about arranging a trip to see him.
“I called the Archdiocese of Washington, thinking I was just going to get the switchboard,” she said, “and I got the archbishop.”
She asked to be put on a list to attend one of the pope’s public appearances. At that point, Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl didn’t know what the pontiff’s schedule would be. He advised Powell to keep checking the archdiocese’s Web site to see what tickets would be available.
The only tickets she found were for Catholics who lived in and around the archdiocese. Even an e-mail to Susan Gibbs, the archdiocese’s spokesman and an organizer of the papal visit, failed to unearth any tickets.
FUNDRAISING FRENZY Meanwhile, Immaculate Heart’s youth group members threw themselves into fundraising. Since fall, they have washed cars, sold lollipops, baby-sat parishioners’ children and organized bingo games. “There has not been any kind of handouts,” said Kim Rankin, whose daughter Emily is going on the trip. “These kids have worked and raised every penny to get there.” She added that the youths were fortunate that Arkansas legalized charitable bingo last year. The group’s first bingo fundraiser netted more than $ 5, 000 from its adult participants.
The youths — who are in the sixth through 12 th grades — have raised about $ 20, 000.
“Nobody in my family has ever seen the pope,” said Emily Rankin, an eighth-grader at Immaculate Heart school. “This is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a growing experience for my religion. Just to see him, he’s the closest thing to God on earth.”
Marche, which is 12 miles north of Little Rock, is a small community originally settled by Polish Catholics in 1877. Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church was founded the following year. Today, the congregation includes about 500 families, and the school has 188 students. Many of the school’s sixth- through eighth-graders also are involved in the church’s youth group.
The Rev. Robert T. Dienert, the parish priest, said the congregation historically has been responsive to the youths’ needs, and this trek to Washington is no different. “The central visible image of the Catholic Church is the Holy Father,” Dienert said. “Anything that can bring us closer to him, people want to support.”
2 WEEKS AWAY Two weeks before the trip, Powell still didn’t have any tickets to see the pope. On April 3, Gibbs of the Washington archdiocese called Powell to tell her the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock had some tickets to distribute. But the diocese had only 25 tickets to see the pope’s Mass at the new Nationals Park baseball stadium in Washington, and 50 tickets for his Mass at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Monsignor J. Gaston Hebert, the Little Rock diocesan administrator, said he was giving those tickets to individuals, not youth groups.
Gibbs told Powell she would keep trying.
“At the end of our conversation, she said, ‘Christie, don’t give up on me, ’” Powell said. “She said she was going to make some phone calls.”
Last Tuesday, Powell received a call from a woman at Catholic University who said she was mailing Powell tickets.
“I about fell on the floor,” she said. “They gave me all the tickets I could ever need, and we’re there.”
Frank Persico, vice president for university relations, said Catholic University had originally dedicated its tickets along the pope’s route for Catholic college students in the Washington area.
“We had some left over,” he said. “We didn’t have time to give a ticket out here and a ticket out there. We said if a church group wants 50 or more, we will give it to them.”
Within two days of announcing the tickets’ availability in The Washington Post, Persico had distributed his surplus. Persico got calls from as far away as Texas and California. Gibbs at the archdiocese e-mailed him about the tickets needed in Marche, he said.
BOUND FOR D. C. The Immaculate Heart group members plan to leave Wednesday afternoon and ride 17 hours straight on two charter buses to get to Washington in time to see the pope. They plan to take a tour of the national monuments Friday and attend Saturday evening Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Then, they’ll board the bus to return home by Sunday. Just as they will see their spiritual leader for the first time, many in the group — including Powell — will be making their first visit to the nation’s capital. Rianna Bradley, a seventhgrader at Immaculate Heart school, said she and other participants have done a lot of praying to get to this point.
The youths also have been studying.
In preparation for their Washington pilgrimage, Powell has taught her students about the life of Pope Benedict XVI. They’ve also learned about apostolic succession — the Catholic belief that all popes can trace their roots back to the apostle Peter, who received his call directly from Christ.
When they see the pope, the students will wear T-shirts with the official papal flag on front and a list of all the popes going back to Peter on the back.