Friday, December 29, 2006 at 1:01am
Religious leaders on Newsweek's 'watch' list
Newsweek magazine named three religious figures among "the people to watch in the year ahead." Jesuit Father John P. Foley, Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Muslim professor Ingrid Mattson made the magazine's gallery of 20 figures to keep an eye on in 2007.
The list covers various fields, from politics to sports, religion to entertainment, and education to business. The feature is part of the magazine's final issue in 2006, most of which was devoted to reviewing news of the past year, Catholic News Service reported Friday.
In 1996 Father Foley opened Cristo Rey Jesuit High School as a college prep school in Chicago's predominantly Hispanic Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood, which has the city's least educated population. With the help of more than 100 area corporations, the school operates a work/study program that has every student working five days every four weeks and attending classes 15 days in that time. Four students share a full-time job, so that on any given day one of the four will be at work and the other three at school.
Father Foley, 71, a Chicago native who joined the Jesuits 53 years ago, told CNS he spent most of his Jesuit life as an educator in Peru before he was called back to Chicago to form Cristo Rey. The name is Spanish for "Christ the King."
He said "we realized this was replicable, that this model can be disseminated" to other cities. Since then 11 other Catholic high schools have opened within the Cristo Rey Network and seven more are due to open this summer, all in poor urban neighborhoods.
Noting that many inner-city schools have dropout rates of 50 percent or more, Newsweek said, "Cristo Rey has succeeded where so many others fail: the four-year dropout rate for the network's graduation class this year was 6 percent, and 96 percent enrolled in a two- or four-year college this fall."
Bishop Jefferts Schori, 52, became the first woman to be elected presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church. She took office in November.
The U.S. Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, is still struggling over women bishops. Some provinces allow them, while others do not.
Born Catholic, Schori joined the Episcopal Church along with her parents when she was 9. She was a marine biologist before she entered the seminary, becoming an Episcopal priest in 1994 and a bishop in 2001.
Canadian-born Mattson, 43, was also a Catholic but stopped believing in her teenage years. Impressed by some of her Muslim friends, she began to study the Korean and became a Muslim at 23.
Fluent in Arabic, she teaches Muslim studies at Hartford (Conn.) Seminary, where she founded the only Muslim chaplaincy program in North America. Recently she was elected president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim educational and social outreach organization in the United States and Canada. She has become "an ambassador for Islam in the West, preaching tolerance and understanding," Newsweek said.
The list covers various fields, from politics to sports, religion to entertainment, and education to business. The feature is part of the magazine's final issue in 2006, most of which was devoted to reviewing news of the past year, Catholic News Service reported Friday.
In 1996 Father Foley opened Cristo Rey Jesuit High School as a college prep school in Chicago's predominantly Hispanic Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood, which has the city's least educated population. With the help of more than 100 area corporations, the school operates a work/study program that has every student working five days every four weeks and attending classes 15 days in that time. Four students share a full-time job, so that on any given day one of the four will be at work and the other three at school.
Father Foley, 71, a Chicago native who joined the Jesuits 53 years ago, told CNS he spent most of his Jesuit life as an educator in Peru before he was called back to Chicago to form Cristo Rey. The name is Spanish for "Christ the King."
He said "we realized this was replicable, that this model can be disseminated" to other cities. Since then 11 other Catholic high schools have opened within the Cristo Rey Network and seven more are due to open this summer, all in poor urban neighborhoods.
Noting that many inner-city schools have dropout rates of 50 percent or more, Newsweek said, "Cristo Rey has succeeded where so many others fail: the four-year dropout rate for the network's graduation class this year was 6 percent, and 96 percent enrolled in a two- or four-year college this fall."
Bishop Jefferts Schori, 52, became the first woman to be elected presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church. She took office in November.
The U.S. Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, is still struggling over women bishops. Some provinces allow them, while others do not.
Born Catholic, Schori joined the Episcopal Church along with her parents when she was 9. She was a marine biologist before she entered the seminary, becoming an Episcopal priest in 1994 and a bishop in 2001.
Canadian-born Mattson, 43, was also a Catholic but stopped believing in her teenage years. Impressed by some of her Muslim friends, she began to study the Korean and became a Muslim at 23.
Fluent in Arabic, she teaches Muslim studies at Hartford (Conn.) Seminary, where she founded the only Muslim chaplaincy program in North America. Recently she was elected president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim educational and social outreach organization in the United States and Canada. She has become "an ambassador for Islam in the West, preaching tolerance and understanding," Newsweek said.