The Traveling Rosary Project

Sharing our faith and growing spiritually are important parts of our mission as a school at St. Agnes and St. Dominic. Through a 16-year-old tradition in our Junior High, Religion teacher Mrs. Julia Schuster has led her 7^th grade students to share their faith and to prayerfully do their part to bring peace to the world.

Each year the students learn jewelry-making techniques and create beautiful rosaries from beads they choose. Each student makes a minimum of two rosaries-one to keep for themselves or to share with a family member and a second one to be donated. Each year the donation recipients are different.

“The cool thing is, no matter what beads a student chose, even if they didn’t look like they would go together, they became a really beautiful rosary,” said 7^th grader Sophia.

Over the years, our students' rosaries have traveled to and been prayed with by people in locations near and far. The recipients have varied from Ave Maria Nursing Home residents here in Memphis to Dominican Sisters and students in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Munich, Germany, and from priests and friends at nearby schools to young girls at a Sisters of Mount Carmel school in Kolkata, India.

 “I wait patiently, praying for guidance from the Holy Spirit, before making the decision,” shared Mrs. Schuster. Each year, the perfect recipients are revealed! This year it became clear that the students of Royal Palm Academy in Naples, Florida, currently rebounding from Hurricane Ian, would be the perfect recipients.” Our new Lower School Dean, Jenn Wojcik, was an administrator at Royal Palm before joining the SAA-SDS community.

This year, in collaboration with Julie Thompson, our new Religion teacher, they are taking the project to another level. The students at Royal Palm will just be the first recipients of this year’s beautiful rosaries. This year we are calling it the “SAA-SDS Traveling Rosary Project,” Mrs. Schuster explained. “Once we zoom with Dean Wojcik's former students and pray the rosary with them, they will pass the rosary they received on to someone else, who will pray with it, and then pass it on.

She continued, “We are attaching a postmarked card to each rosary so the person receiving it can put their name and location on it and pass the rosary/card on to another person to continue to say the rosary. The last person who receives it gets to keep the rosary, but we are asking them to mail back the self-addressed card so we can track how far our students' rosaries traveled.” 

Class member Elsa is very excited about what this project can do, sharing “We really enjoyed learning to make the rosaries, and knowing that this will help share our faith with others is important to us.”

At Lower School Mass on October 21 Father James Martin blessed the rosaries, explaining to the students that in doing so, he was actually offering up a blessing for the people who would receive them. It is our hope that everyone who receives the rosaries will take the time to pray, to slow down and find calm. We want them to see the power of prayer in their lives!