Matt Brubaker: We had Easter Monday off, um, when the Pope died Easter Monday morning. As we came back to school, we stopped all of our classes at 11 o'clock, brought all of our students to the church. We all went into deep prayer and we prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet as an entire school. And then this coming Friday, tomorrow at 2:30, we'll do an all school rosary that's kind of a sendoff before his funeral on Saturday. While the Pope Francis was sick, we were doing weekly rosaries as a way to show our students that prayer does work and prayer brings us all together in a hard time with each other.
Marilyn Gleason: And we've known for a while that the Pope was in firm and getting older.
MB: So the Pope did get sick on Valentine's Day, he ended up in the hospital. And then a big part of Lent is suffering and to, you know, bring yourself not as much of a joyous time, but as kind of a sorrowful time in the church as we prepare for the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was a sad time and it was a good time for all of us to kind of come together as a school community to pray, and to kinda show each other and be a support for each other. Not only for the priests, but in our own interactions with our own Lent and fasting and alms giving.
MG: You don't happen to know the chaplet by heart do you?
MB: I do. So the chaplet's a lot of different prayers. It starts off with an Our Father, A Hail Mary and the Apostle's Creed. But then it goes into all of us kind of focusing on the Eucharist of our Lord Jesus. So it says, Eternal Father, I offer you the body and blood, soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.
And then we pray it with a rosary beads. And for each bead of the decade, we pray for the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world. So it's a way for all of us in the whole, you know, Catholic community, which is worldwide. And a good part of that is that this chaplet can be prayed in any language. And as we are praying, not only for ourselves and our community, but we're praying for mercy upon all of us, for the whole world.
MG: Okay. Do you have anything else to say about Francis? Because he was really different than the popes beforehand.
MB: What's wonderful about Pope Francis is that he was actually a Jesuit priest and there's a lot of different orders of priests that they can take. Pope Francis was a Jesuit priest, which means he took a vow of poverty at the beginning of his priesthood when he was down in Argentina. And while he was doing that, he never, you know, the pope gets a lot of treatment. Of you know, kind of riches, and fancy dinners, and silk red shoes and all those things. Pope Francis was very humble, and a very down to earth priest that never really showed off and had fancy things. He was kind of the people's pope. It was really beautiful.
