The 6th Grade students at the Basilica School led the student body, faculty and staff in a prayer against world hunger on Tuesday, December 10th. The prayer wave, organized by Caritas Internationalis, was discovered by students doing research for a religion project on efforts to alleviate world hunger. The prayer began at noon December 10th local time on the island of Samoa in the Pacific, and move west, time zone by time zone. Student Ciara Barrett was the first to hit on this news item, but the rest of the class quickly responded. Together they spearheaded the noon prayer effort. The students made posters, announcements and even composed a short poem to inform the rest of the school. The students also took on the logistics challenge: a typical noon finds half the school at lunch on one end of the campus, the rest in their classrooms. The 6th graders broke themselves into two teams to lead the prayers in each location. Right before noon, copies of the prayer, “One Human Family-Food for All,” were distributed, students tall and small joined hands in hallways and the cafeteria, and all were called to pray for the hungry of the world. Pope Francis endorsed the prayer wave by inviting all people to act “as one single human family, to give a voice to all of those who suffer silently from hunger, so that this voice becomes a roar which can shake the world.” A copy of the prayer can be found on The Basilica School Facebook page.
