By Seamus Hanley ‘24
This past week, I was blessed enough to be invited to a two-day conference involving Edmund Rice’s mission of advocacy. We collaborated with Brother Rice in Bloomfield Hills, MI, as well as St. Laurence here in Chicago. This conference taught me ways on how to combat homelessness and raise awareness in my community.
One of the directors of the conference, Cormac McArt, told me why he thinks getting youths involved in the mission of advocacy is important.
Cormac said, “The young people in our schools are future decision makers, future voters. It is important that their voices are heard.”
The main idea of Edmund Rice’s mission is to be a voice for the voiceless and to inform the youth about the faith and their relationship with it.
Senior J.D. Gamboa said, “I view my faith as me walking uphill a mountain. I fall sometimes, but I get back up and continually strengthen my faith.”
It is important for Christian youths to be constantly growing in their faith. There are many important details in the Catholic faith including service, advocacy, and many more important roles. Every person may have a different detail he or she finds most important. To me, the idea of advocacy is most important, because I think it is a major way to end world poverty.
For the past three years, I have worked alongside many students and teachers to promote the idea of advocacy. Mr. Dolan, the moderator of our Advocacy Club, is a perfect example of how to promote advocacy.
Mr. Dolan said, “Advocacy is the vision of Blessed Edmund (Rice). You have to go about trying to find what’s wrong with the world and get to the root causes of things.”
As a Christian Brothers School, we are called to act with advocacy. Each and every day, we work to make the world a better place.
