The faculty built a special altar with four different blocks and a top to hold the blocks together. The students assembled the altar right in front of the entire school at the beginning of the Mass to signify unity within the walls of Notre Dame. Mr. Luttringer, the principal, put the finishing touch on the altar by placing a centerpiece in the middle after the students had finished assembling the other parts. This was then accented with green and gold cloths that were placed on top.
The Bishop gave a wonderful homily about perception of life. He went into interesting detail about how we as people control the way we live and how the way we look at things can affect us in the long run. He made very valid points about how handling things positively to begin with causes a better outcome at the end. This view on life that he had given us stirred up very interesting questions in our minds and we were lucky enough to be able to ask him these question later over lunch.
Our very own Nataliy Cornejo and Claudia Alvarado had the pleasure of sitting down with Bishop Barnes after Mass to ask him just how he got to where he was and why a positive perception of life was so important to him. We first asked what gave him the inspiration to join the priesthood and his answer was simple: he enjoyed helping others. He then went into detail about how he grew up and that his family used to own a small market where the town would buy their groceries. The people in his town did not have much and only bought what they needed so the Bishop, as a child, did his best to make sure that these people received what they needed.
We also asked him about his times in the seminary and we were shocked to find out that he wasn’t immediately accepted into the ministry and even encountered issues while trying to become a priest. He told us about his many years of teaching and how his students meant the world to him so he did what he could in order to help them pass and understand the material he was teaching them. Many of his students were very uneducated and could not read or write so he developed different methods to getting the material, relying more on verbal communication, and relation to the students’ everyday lives. He did what he could to help whoever he could and that’s why he holds his position and is the Bishop we know him as today.