Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2009 / Teen already found a home in Church
Teen already found a home in Church
by Kristin Lukowski of The Michigan Catholic
Published March 27, 2009
Editor's note: This is the fourth in a series to help readers get to know those who will join our Catholic family at the Easter vigil.
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Kristin Lukowski | The Michigan Catholic
Zachary Smith, who's attended Catholic schools for years, will come into the faith this Easter. |
Detroit — Since Zachary Smith has attended Catholic schools his whole life, joining the Church seemed a natural choice when he got old enough to make the decision for himself. Smith, 16, a junior at University of Detroit Jesuit High School, is one of nearly 1,300 people joining the Church fully this Easter. Smith will receive all three sacraments of initiation — baptism, First Communion and confirmation — next month.
Smith said the Catholic faith had been built into his education, as he attended Gesu Catholic School, Detroit, until he entered U of D Jesuit. One of his grandmothers is Catholic, but his family wanted him to choose his own faith path later in life, so he wasn't baptized into any faith. But many of the tenets of Catholicism he learned in school were already things he believed. "It sort of made sense to me," he said.
He's been attending classes for the Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults since the fall, and found that much of what he learned was already covered in his classes. As he got into the later classes, though, he learned a lot about the details of the faith he hadn't quite understood previously.
"The symbolic things, I could understand more," he said. "Before, I couldn't understand it, and I didn't question it."
He's been in the program at Gesu with another U of D Jesuit student, Ayinde Anderson, with whom he would occasionally carpool. His sponsor is his kindergarten teacher, Maria Montbriand. "I don't feel like I'm doing this alone," Smith said.
Attending the Rite of Election, when those joining the faith come before the archbishop, also helped to cement that sense of community. He was thinking a couple people from each parish would attend, not 1,300 over five celebrations. "So many people are going through the same process," he said — and that's just within his archdiocese.
Smith hopes to get involved as an altar server, and possibly as a Eucharistic minister, member of the bell choir and as a lector. Outside of church, the A student and Oak Park resident plays the piano, just joined the school's track team, and hopes to pursue a career in science, possibly nuclear medicine at Boston College, or Georgetown University or Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
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