For the Children

Children. They were at the heart of everything for Julie Billart.

Even while paralyzed 22 years, even before the Sisters of Notre Dame came into being, Saint Julie surrounded herself with children. She taught them, took interest in them, prayed for them.

When we talk of the history of the Sisters of Notre Dame, it’s often education that’s first on our lips.

But Saint Julie saw education as a means to an end, and the end was the survival of children, children crying out for help. She heard this cry in the deprivations of the countryside, in the horrors of war, in the head-long din of day-to-day struggle when the raised arms of the smallest ones were often passed by.

Still today, that cry reaches us. Whether from Gaza, Ukraine or our own streets, it is the suffering face of a child that so stops us, and that so crystalizes the truth of the matter – any matter.

Perhaps because Saint Julie spent decades confined to a bed with time to think deeply and pray deeply; or perhaps because she was, as a cardinal once wrote of her, ‘a spark fallen from the heart of God’ – she never lost that understanding that in the face of a child is the face of Christ. If in our actions or inactions we cause or allow children to suffer, we are doing likewise to Christ.

And so Saint Julie resolved to be a benefactor of children, and instructed her Sisters to do likewise.

For 221 years, we have done our best.

Our schools are bricks and mortar, but they are testaments to love as well. Our solar arrays in Africa are glass and steel, but they are also the light for boys and girls wanting to read and understand the world. Our wells for clean water are pipes and pumps, but they spare young bodies from disease, too, and replace the hours trudging to waterholes with hours learning from teachers.

Montessori education, straight from the American heartland, is now rooted in Nigeria – by our Sisters. Impoverished children in our own southwestern states, once with nothing in the cold, now wear coats, shoes and warm clothing from our Sisters’ hands. Children who are deaf in Kenya, once with few to no options for learning, are now at classroom desks studying beside their hearing peers – because of Notre Dame special education.

Perhaps most of all, children around the world have been brought into the saving grace of our faith.  

On December 25, we celebrate Christ’s birth. There will be children born on this same date, and children born on the 364 other days besides. In each of these children, there will be Christ. For as Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes me.”

Please join with us as Christ is born again all over our world. Saint Julie, at every opportunity, welcomed children. And with all her strength she gave them what they needed for life. With your support, we continue in her footsteps.

Please give as you can and know that I, along with my Sisters, wish you a Christ-filled Christmas.

Sincerely,

Sister Donna Wisowaty, SNDdeN
Provincial