2024 | ISSUE 4 | SJC Newsletter

Identity News

Student Voice on the Future of Geelong Regional Needs

The Committee for Geelong invited student representatives from St Joseph’s College to collaborate with other Geelong young people about building their capacity to have a voice about the future of their Geelong regional needs.

Jack Kayler Thompson (Gospel Spirituality Touchstone Leader) and William Bradley (Inclusive Community Touchstone Leader), recently attended the Future Leaders Workshop with a range of fellow students from across a range of Geelong Secondary Schools. They gathered at The Share Plate Conference Room at The Gordan. The Committee for Geelong (Committee) is developing a Community Leadership led by Committee for Geelong Chief Executive Michael Johnston

Building on its highly successful community leadership programs, Leaders for Geelong and Activate, the Committee has been working with local secondary schools since last year on designing a new program aimed at building community leadership within secondary school students.

The students participated in a workshop, where they heard from Michael Johnston about his connections and commitment to living and working in the Geelong region and his hopes for the future of his children. He facilitated a guided sequence of interactive discussions the students took place in to contribute to building a new ‘Future Leaders’ program that will help participating students to:

• Understand their local community;
• What are its issues?
• What are its opportunities?
• How they can give back?
• How they can lead?

Following a successful workshop with staff from various secondary schools last year, the Committee ran this second co-design workshop on 5 March to provide a student voice to the program’s design.

A further highlight was a guest speaker, Rob Brown, who is the founder of Fruit to Work – Creating Chances which is a social enterprise company that supplies fruit, milk and pantry items to work places. It has been successful in creating chances for those who are seeking re-entry to the workforce after a lived experience in the justice system. Rob shared his own experience of this and the challenges, especially for women, seeking a chance to re-establish themselves.

Catholic Education Week Celebrations

After successfully celebrating our Gospel and Spirituality Assembly, representatives from the Gospel and Spirituality Touchstone team were invited to attend the Catholic Education Week events taking place in Melbourne last Friday. Our students participated in The Mass of St Patrick for Schools at St Patrick’s Cathedral, along with primary and secondary schools from across the Archdiocese of Melbourne. Archbishop Peter Comensoli gave a special acknowledgement to us as a Geelong school who had travelled to the Mass, along with many others to be ‘Welcomed home at the mother Church’.

Following the Mass, we supported student our Year 12 Gospel and Spirituality Prefect, Josef Paatsch, who was participating in a presention at the colloquium at the Catholic Leadership Centre. We enjoyed lunch together, then listened to the ‘The Young Speakers Colloquium.’ This event brings together young people in Catholic Schools across the Melbourne regions to create an afternoon of learning, inspiration, and wonder, with the goal of provoking conversations that matter. The theme for this year’s event was: “Living lives of faith, hope and love in the light of Christ”. The Creative Arts Exhibition reflected students’ interpretation of this theme through various mediums on display.

The Young Speakers Colloquium consisted of students who participated in the ACU School Leaders Program travel to Rome and London for a three-week immersion in the Catholic Western tradition and those who attended the World Youth Festival in Lisbon. There was a collective energy from the panel presenters who reflected on their insights to the importance of their faith journeys and how their journey has changed and grown through their lived experiences and how their recent study tour and pilgrimages internationally have made their faith experiences more tangible and profound.

Here are some reflections shared from Josef’s presentation:

This afternoon, I have the honour of speaking to you about my unique experiences and perspectives of faith, hope, and love, and how through these virtues, I have both witnessed and been called into the light of Christ.

Throughout my childhood we still attended mass every Sunday at my local parish Corio and Lara. Through the participation in mass I was able to do readings which allowed me to foster my leadership skills, in particular my public speaking, something I’m forever grateful for. In addition to attending mass, my faith, beliefs and values were further developed whilst attending St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School Lara. Given my schools name, our faith education placed great importance on the teachings of St Anthony of Padua. St Anthony’s belief that ‘Actions speak louder than words – let our words teach and actions speak!” This inspired me to be called into the light of Christ myself and partake in serving my community through fund-raisers, working bees and helping the vulnerable. Reflecting upon my younger years, it is apparent that these two communities were fundamental in shaping my faith, beliefs and values.

As I grew older, I found myself somewhat drifting away from my faith, with various factors contributing to this distance.

Ultimately, during the challenging Covid years of 2020 and 2021, I gradually stopped attending church and became increasingly disconnected from my faith. This sense of disconnection was exacerbated by personal hardships that I endured during those years. The culmination of these hardships occurred in 2021 with the loss of a close friend to suicide. This tragedy significantly impacted me as a person and deepened the already widening gap between my faith and I.

Following Covid, I was thankfully able to rediscover my faith, through my school, St Joseph’s College Geelong. At school, I was presented with different ways to express my faith beyond just going to Church every week, most significantly was the idea of expressing faith through service and helping our neighbour. I first explored the idea of expressing faith through service within the senior student leadership as a Gospel Spirituality Touchstone Leader. Gospel Spirituality, along with Inclusive Community, Justice and Solidarity and Liberating Education are the four Edmund Rice Education Touchstones St Joseph’s bases it values and teachings on. Gospel Spirituality specifically invites all students and staff into the story of Jesus and strives to make his message of compassion, justice and peace a living reality within our community. As a Gospel Spirituality team, we challenged ourselves to spread this message through our own service, hoping to make it a living reality within our School community.

I undertook this challenge and expression of my faith through my service by involving myself in mental health causes such as Movember, The Push Up Challenge and Life Changer. These causes, that I am still incredibly passionate about, have helped me heal my hardships regarding my friend’s death, but also help create a positive environment for those in my school community surrounding their mental health.

I wasn’t able to fully reconnect with my faith until late last year, when I was appointed to lead the Gospel Spirituality Team as a Year 12 Prefect. As Year 12 Prefect, I was presented with the opportunity from MACS and ACU to participate in the 2023 ACU Young Leaders Program. The ACU Leaders Program was a three week program, with two weeks in Rome and one week in London.

Due to this, I truly believe the ACU Young Leaders Immersion not only made me more connected to my faith and a better leader, but also a better person, therefore I am internally in debt to those who created the opportunity for me to go on the immersion.

In closing, I’d like to reiterate the importance of service and how it can act as an opportunity to express faith. I would also wish to repeat my thanks to Jenna and everyone at MACS for not only the privilege to speak today, but for putting on a fantastic event, celebrating the importance of Catholic Education.
Josef Paatsch - Gospel and Spirituality Prefect

Holy Week 2024

As we move from praying with St Patrick and from the Feast of St Joseph this week, we head into Holy Week. We will gather as a Catholic community on Wednesday 27 March for our Easter Liturgy featuring Palm Sunday and the Last Supper leading to Jesus’ trial, as we await the Easter triduum. The three days, known as the summit of the Liturgical Year, from the evening of Holy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday. As Pope Francis has proposed that 2024 be marked as a year dedicated to prayer in preparation for the Jubilee 2025, our Chapel is open on a Monday morning and Wednesday lunchtime.

As we celebrated the feast of Saint Joseph, we recognised that we don’t know a lot about Joseph, as he only appears in the beginning of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. We know that he was born of the royal house of David and he was a humble carpenter. From the stories we have, we can see that he cared for Jesus and his mother Mary, and was a good and upright man. Joseph showed great courage, devotion and strength, and is a model of trust and faith in God. Our sculpture of Joseph and the teenage Jesus, greets our students every day as they get off the bus and head to their classes, to remind them that they were humble men of compassion and integrity, they too, can aspire to.

As we move through Holy Week, let us go forth full of confidence, ready to be Christ in the world and sure in the knowledge that, in doing so, we will bear much fruit.

Lord, inspire us to live faithfully in the light of Christ and grant us your blessings on our St Joseph’s Community. Amen.

Mary Malone
Director of Identity