Saint Cloud Visitor Home Page

by Sue Schulzetenberg
Visitor Staff Writer

ST. ANTHONY — Bags and bundles of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and orange rosaries pile on Cindy Breth’s kitchen table.
Beside the table are racks of similar rosaries of differing colors.

“I call them the rainbow of colors,” Breth said. The rosaries are Breth’s handiwork, which, like the around-40,000-or-so other rosaries that she made, will go into hands around the world.

Breth is a member of St. Anthony Parish in St. Anthony. After she completes the rosaries, her aunts and friends find places for them. The rosaries have traveled or will travel to other countries like Africa or India. Some are given to Poor Clare Sisters at St. Clare’s Monastery in Sauk Rapids and others go to Catholic schools.

“They go wherever people are in need of them,” she said.

Breth’s rosary-making started with her mother’s encouragement, without which Breth might never have gone on to make the thousands of rosaries.

	Cindy Breth holds some of the thousands of rosaries she has made for people who need them. (SCV photo by Sue Schulzetenberg)

by Joseph Young
Visitor Interim Editor
LUXEMBURG — For 125 years, OSBs from St. Joseph have been helping the students of Luxemburg with the three R’s — the ABCs of readin’ and ritin’ and the variable XYZs of ’rithmetic.

To commemorate that anniversary and honor the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict (OSB) at St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, St. Wendelin Parish in Luxemburg is inviting the public to what it hopes is an SRO (standing room only) celebration — no RSVP required.

The parish and St. Wendelin School are hosting an open house from 2 to 4 p.m. June 11 at the parish’s Mary Hall, said Father Tom Knoblach, St. Wendelin’s pastor. The general invitation extends to all members of the public, Father Knoblach said, adding that he is especially hopeful that former pastors, teachers and principals of St. Wendelin’s parish and school can attend — “and, of course, the sisters as well as those who learned so well from them, the alumni and alumnae of St. Wendelin School,” he said.

Father Knoblach is certain of two Benedictine sisters who will be present at the open house — Sister Marius Hiltner and Sister Theodora Nelson. Both live on the parish grounds and help educate St. Wendelin’s students.

Church bells toll and chime for all
“No church is an island entire of itself,” wrote the poet John Donne in 1624.
Actually, Donne wrote, “No man is an island ...” but his sentiments — essentially that we’re all in this life together — also apply to assemblages of men (and women and children) called churches.

This notion that “the community of man” also extends to churches seems to be understood by the people in charge of planning for the 137 churches of the St. Cloud Diocese. What the planners understand is, “All the diocese’s parishes are in this life of the church together.”

And so, in early 2004, a 45-member St. Cloud-area Metro Planning Group was formed and began meeting to brainstorm and formulate proposals for metro parish staffing with the goal of more lay involvement in light of fewer priests.

Continued . . .

Editorial 2: Sometimes nice guys finish first, Leo

Chicago Cubs baseball fans are long-suffering. The last World Series the Cubs appeared in was in 1945; the last Series they won was in 1908.

Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher managed the Cubs from 1966 to 1972. He is the guy who’s famous for saying, “Nice guys finish last.”

I don’t know any Chicago Cubs personally, so I can’t vouch that they’re nice guys, as Durocher’s aphorism would imply.

But I do know one Cubs fan pretty well. He’s a nice guy. And at the national Catholic Press Association (CPA) awards presentation at the Catholic Media Convocation in Nashville May 24-26, he showed that Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last” maxim doesn’t hold water. Indeed, it was blown out of the water.

This Cubs fan — Joe Towalski, who worked as a staff writer and editor at the Visitor from 1992 to 2005, accepted an unprecedented 20 CPA awards, including a first place in general excellence, for the Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese which he now edits. Among the individual awards Towalski himself won were three for editorials he wrote — two first places and one third.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. END

St. Anthony woman hath wrought a ‘rainbow’ of rosaries