IN THIS ISSUE ...

Visitor Stories:

• Celebrating partnership’s Harvest

• Back to catholic school . . . For an education not beyond belief

• EDITORIAL: We do not live on the planet Hearth

FAITH ALIVE





Back to Catholic School


A pair of girls from SS. Peter & Paul School in Richmond are driven to study hard this year. (Photos courtesy of SS. Peter & Paul School)




Students at Holy Family School in Sauk Centre open the door to a new school year. (Photo courtesy of Holy Family School)


At. St. Joseph’s Lab School in St. Joseph, students hurry so as not to be tardy. (SCV photo by Sue Schulzetenberg)


A boy and his backpack pose proudly in preparation for class at Holy Family School in Albany.
(Photo courtesy of Holy Family School)

Celebrating partnership’s Harvest

by Sue Schulzetenberg
Visitor Staff Writer

SPRING HILL — A child face-painted a rainbow on another child’s cheek while grown-ups greeted each other under a cloudy sky.

Surrounding them were farm fields, ripe for harvest, a fitting setting for the eighth annual Harvest for Hope celebration at Rosie and Urban Spanier’s farm in rural Spring Hill. The event has become a cherished tradition at the Spaniers’ farm.

With a bountiful gathering of people, platefuls of corn and other vegetables and pork from a hog roast, and even an eventual heavenly rain, the day seemed to have everything a good harvest requires.

	SPRING HILL — Children take their pick in choosing which suckers are the winners during one of the children’s games at the Harvest for Hope Celebration Sept. 3 in Spring Hill. (SCV photo by Sue Schulzetenberg)

Back to Catholic School . . .
For an Education not Beyond Belief

Yellow buses buzz over roads like bees, then unload backpack-toting boys, and girls who greet one another with waves (as at St. Andrew’s School in Elk River, above) and who mug for photographers documenting their first day back (as at Holy Family School in Albany, left). Kindergartners eat school pizza for the first time, first-graders bring apples to teachers and second-graders re-explore playground equipment. Older children fill their lockers and get filled in on what friends did during vacation. It all says what most children haven’t heard all summer: “School’s in!” The first day of school was Aug. 30 at St. Cloud-area Catholic schools, and Sept. 5 at other schools across the St. Cloud Diocese.

	Smiles on the faces of these returning students from St. Andrew’s School in Elk River show that the end of summer vacation is not really so bad after all. (Photo courtesy of St. Andrew’s School)
A teacher reads aloud to students at St. Mary’s School in Breckenridge. (Photo courtesy of St. Mary’s School)
	Left, returning students at St. Mary’s School in Alexandria stand poised to be taught. (Photo courtesy of St. Mary’s School)

EDITORIAL: We do not live on the planet Hearth

Astronomer Carl Sagan said there are “billions and billions of stars” in our Milky Way Galaxy. Actually, Johnny Carson impersonating Sagan said this. Regardless, there are 400 billion stars in the galaxy. And that’s just the tip, an infinitesimal tip, of the “outer-spaceberg.”

Indeed, there is probably an infinite number of stars. Maybe even, oxymoronically, there is an infinite number of universes, all simultaneously occupying hyperspaces of infinitely diverse multiple dimensions.

In other words, there are really lots of stars out there and, likely, lots of life too. In God’s infinite creation, surely Earth is not the sole inhabited planet.

Sure, sure, infinity — that notion that something has no end — is a difficult concept for us humans to wrap our limited gray matter around. But remember, with God all things are possible. Does “life everlasting” ring a bell? Do you believe God “always was, always will be?

Anyway, one of those literally countless numbers of stars is our own sun. Orbiting it is our planet, Earth. A city on Earth, Philadelphia, is the seat of an archdiocese led by Cardinal Justin Rigali.

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