During this academic year, the Prison and Reentry Apostolate (PARA) has several batches of letters from the 5th and 6th grade CCD classes at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Sutton, NE. Thanks go out to Mrs. Tracy Galusha for spearheading this effort. She first heard about PARA from Seth Odgaard, the founder of Christ Crucified, a local non-profit organization whose mission is to make Christ known and loved through the Passion. Tracy wanted to find a way to write letters to the incarcerated. As she has shared, “I was very moved by the story of Servant of God Jacques Fesch – ‘No one is beyond repentance or redemption.’ Writing letters of encouragement and hope to those in prison… is something anyone can do – even elementary students.” It was an easy “yes” for PARA to find a way to make this happen, even as we navigated the necessary protocol and compliance with the state facilities.
High school students at St. Mary’s Catholic Church have performed service projects and gone on mission trips the past couple years and this ignited a fire for her younger CCD students, “They wanted to be ‘on mission’ too!” So Tracy started Monthly Missions for her Wednesday classes. This past fall, 9 students in her 6th grade class wrote letters of encouragement to the incarcerated. Then, for the spring, she had her 11 students in the 5th grade class join the effort.
Letters are shared, a few at a time, with a Bible Study at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, and they are available to all the state facilities in the diocese. Students, known only by their first names in the letters, have shared some of what they are learning, offered prayers of encouragement, given reminders of God’s love and mercy for the incarcerated, and provided a token of love, joy, and support for the incarcerated. The letters are read aloud, and the smiles, laughs, and head nods from those in prison give such a beautiful witness to how the Church extends even to those in prison. These students dignify all our incarcerated brothers and sisters who hear the letters. Tracy shared that, “My hope is that this opportunity gives students the desire to have a heart more like Jesus’s – a heart that can meet people where they’re at and share the love of God no matter their circumstances. Writing letters to those serving their ‘time’ has allowed students to put on a new lens, seeing them as brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Anyone who would like to join us in writing letters to our incarcerated brothers and sisters can take courage from Tracy and her students, “We must never forget that our Lord was put in prison on the night he was betrayed.” Reach out to me at lbaus@csshope.org to learn more and start writing!
