Two students from Bethlehem High School in Bardstown, Ky., who had never travelled outside of the United States, had a once-in-a-lifetime experience on Jan. 14.
Kathryn Lancaster, a senior, and Hayden Carney, a junior, were selected to meet Pope Leo XIV and present him with three gifts representing the Archdiocese of Louisville during a papal audience.
Both Lancaster and Carney described the experience of meeting Pope Leo as surreal. A month later, they had trouble putting into words what the experience meant to them.
“It’s not really something you can imagine unless you have been there,” said Lancaster.
Both students recounted that it was just like meeting another person, mentioning that Pope Leo is very humble.
“He was very grateful for the gifts, and easy to talk to,” Lancaster said.
Initially, Carney said, “I was just excited to have the opportunity to travel to a different country. It wasn’t until we got to Rome that we knew we would get to be in the same room as the pope. But it wasn’t until the morning of that I realized I was the person to be up there right in front of him, and give him the gifts and talk to him. … I was nervous the entire time. I was having butterflies and everything. … Once I got up there, I wasn’t nervous at all.”
The first of three gifts they presented to the Holy Father was a spiritual bouquet — prayer intentions submitted by Bethlehem’s students and faculty and their relatives. The students presented this bouquet to Pope Leo with the intention of uniting in prayer and growing closer to God, they said.
The second gift was a commemorative sweatshirt designed for the pilgrimage, which featured signatures of student participants as well as a verse from the Gospel of Mark: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The third gift was a bottle of “Faithfully Crafted” bourbon, made for the Archdiocese of Louisville by Log Still Distillery.
Bethlehem’s pilgrimage to Rome could have been like most other school trips to the Vatican. The group didn’t know until the night before if their opportunity to attend the papal audience had been granted.
Once they found out, their teacher, Dr. Nathalie Corbett, said she received three “golden” tickets when she picked up the audience tickets. They allowed her and two students to meet the Holy Father. She was tasked with selecting two students — a boy and a girl — who would modestly and humbly represent their school, its mission and the archdiocese, she said.
The audience was coordinated with the help of Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre, who wrote to Pope Leo on behalf of Bethlehem’s international travellers. Archbishop Fabre said in his letter to Pope Leo, “As a Catholic institution, prayer is central to the education Bethlehem provides. Travelers mentioned remembering vividly your request for prayer when introduced as our new pontiff.”
The international trip was one of a variety of learning experiences provided during Bethlehem’s annual Star Term, a two-week term at the beginning of the second semester. The school’s teachers create the mini-courses, and topics have ranged widely over the years, from history and craft projects to travel.
Gilly Simpson teaches a course about the Kentucky Holy Land.
“My class took three day-long field trips, mixed in with class work and writing assignments,” he said in an email about the course. “We also had Google Meets with three current bishops with Holy Land ties. … Part of our writing assignments included submitting Facebook posts to the administrator of the ‘Kentucky Holy Land Catholics’ page.
“He has started posting them, and the comments have been amazing! There have been numerous history and ancestral discussions that I have enjoyed following,” said Simpson. “Some of the ancestry comments trace family heritages all the way back to the first English Catholics coming to the colonies on the Ark and the Dove in 1634.”
