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Seventy students knelt before an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on her feast day Dec. 12 at St. Fabian Catholic School in Farmington Hills, MI, and consecrated themselves to Jesus through his Blessed Mother.
Students in fifth through eighth grade spent the month preparing for their Marian consecration by reading the book "33 Days to Morning Glory: A Do-It-Yourself Retreat In Preparation for Marian Consecration" by Fr. Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, praying a daily decade of the rosary and sacrificing their recess and lunch hour once a week for small group discussions.
The students' act of radical faith came at the suggestion of Fr. Matthew Kurt, who was preparing to renew his own Marian consecration on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, also his birthday.
Fr. Kurt, who was ordained by Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron in May and assigned to St. Fabian in July, approached Kim Kerwin, the parish director of religious education and a middle school theology teacher at St. Fabian, with the idea of leading both the parish and the school to make their Marian consecration.
“We told the kids, ‘Absolutely no pressure; nobody has to do it, but if you want to do this, you are going to meet with us once a week during lunch and recess. We are going to meet with you guys and talk and reflect with you about what the reading for the last week was like, and we are going to give you discussion questions,’” Kerwin explained.
Kerwin and Fr. Kurt expected no more than 10 students to sign up — instead, 70 signed up and saw it through to the end.
“It was overwhelming how, including unlikely kids, said, ‘Yeah, that sounds awesome. I do want to give up recess for a time to go and sit and talk about Mary,’” Kerwin said.
Kerwin divided the students into boys and girls small groups by grade and appointed an eighth grader as the leader of each group. Kerwin and Fr. Kurt encouraged the students to go to confession in preparation for their consecration.
The fruits of the consecration were already apparent before the act itself, Kerwin said. Students reread passages while in class, carry the book around in school, and reference it regularly in their classes.
“We’ve heard some really great conversations among the kids,” Kerwin said. “It is not a super hard book, but some of them are 10 or 11 years old, and they are chewing on this and really digesting the goodness of the Blessed Mother, the beauty of the Immaculate Conception and how she is a Mediatrix that takes us to Jesus. And I have seen them grow in their faith.”