A great story about a great program

Read a wonderful piece about Notre Dame's outstanding, game-changing Alliance for Catholic Education (A.C.E.) program, in The New York Times (!!), here:

Devoting themselves to society’s overlooked and left-behind, voluntarily accepting a wage of $1,000 a month that is roughly at the federal poverty line, living in intentional Christian households, the 1,600 teachers produced by ACE in its 19-year history have formed the 21st-century equivalent of the sisters and brothers from Catholic religious orders whose sacrifices for decades sustained the American parochial school system.       

“Perhaps the ACErs were an anticipation of what the religious life would look like in the next generation,” the priest and author Andrew M. Greeley wrote in his novel “The Bishop at the Lake.”       

The Rev. Nathan Wills, a former ACE teacher who recently visited with the Tucson cohort, looked backward for an analogy. “It’s a reflection of the disciples,” he said. “This is what the apostles did when Jesus sent them to teach. They set up communities in the midst of difficult circumstances.” . . .