Knights and Catholic Daughters live out the ‘spirituality of community’

"Do you want to hear a funny story? I thought it was condemned.” Lee Lopez, Chancellor of the Knights of Columbus Council #8170 didn’t even know that St. Theresa (of the Little Flower) Church was a functioning parish, at first. While he was on retreat at Our Lady of Corpus Christi, he ran past it one morning and assumed that it was closed down because of the state of the structures and the landscaping. When a friend informed him that it was indeed open and operational, he knew he needed to help. “It’s amazing what you can do with four phone calls and two text messages,” he said. 

Those communications led to a group of his brother Knights and volunteers – including his father, brother, sons, friends, Catholic Daughters, and young men needing community service for school or confirmation – committing to a hard day’s work. One man even worked a night shift, slept a couple of hours in his car, and got back to work helping with the landscaping team.

Indeed, “just a ‘hail Mary’ away from Our Lady of Corpus Christi” sits St. Theresa Church, a small parish with an aging but dedicated community. On Saturday morning, March 23, parish workers from St. Paul the Apostle, Most Precious Blood, and St. Theresa converged to help make the parish a little more beautiful and functional. 

The tasks for the day were carefully organized by Deacon Stephen Nolte of St. Theresa and his assistant, Paul Pineda. Teams concentrated on different areas of the parish and the adjoining school building, including yard work, repairing windows, power washing and boxing books. Not even an hour into the morning, one of the teams had already cleared out and trimmed the rectory yard, including the demolition of a long-defunct raised garden.

Over by the school building, teams were hard at work, as well. Even though it hasn’t been a functional school for ten years, the parish has been working on cleaning up the school building for the past two years. Restoring the classrooms will help the parish save on the cost of air conditioning the entire parish hall for CCD classes, and give them a smaller, more functional space to use. They had previously installed new outdoor lights to make the building safer and, on this day, they worked on power washing the exteriors and inside the bathroom to ready it for use. 

A team consisting of members of Catholic Daughters and the Altar Society boxed up books and cleaned out one of the classrooms. Around the corner, a group of ladies from Saint Theresa cooked lunch for all of the volunteers. “This is a great gesture from the other churches,” said Celia Quesada. “It means a lot to have the help.”

In his address at the Pastoral Planning meeting in August of 2018, Bishop Michael Mulvey quoted from “Novo Millennio Ineunte,” an Apostolic Letter from Pope Saint John Paul II about a “spirituality of communion.” His hope was that unity and harmony among the people and parishes of the diocese would feed the spiritual preparation for forming a pastoral plan. This spirituality, Deacon Nolte said, is exactly what inspired this Knights of Columbus group, the Catholic Daughters, and other volunteers to come help out. As Pope Saint John Paul II says in his letter, “A spirituality of communion means, finally, to know how to ‘make room’ for our brothers and sisters, bearing ‘each other’s burdens’ (Gal 6:2) and resisting the selfish temptations which constantly beset us ... Let us have no illusions: unless we follow this spiritual path, external structures of communion will serve very little purpose.”

A total of 49 people came out that day to live out the “spirituality of communion” and worked for six hours to accomplish the projects that would have taken St. Theresa parishioners at least a month to complete. Not only that, but they have promised to come back for more. In fact, many of the Knights involved in this project spoke of committing to help at parishes across the diocese as they have need. “The Spirit of God is alive and moving!” Deacon Nolte said. He added that this act of kindness has bolstered the faith of the St. Theresa community and is a good reminder that “God knows no boundaries and calls us to love wherever we are.”