When religious education classes convene on Sunday mornings in downtown Atlanta’s Sacred Heart Church, the international makeup of contemporary Atlanta is readily evident in the shining young faces of the parish children.

Among an average of 150 children regularly enrolled in religious education classes, a dozen or more ethnic and cultural backgrounds are easily distinguishable. Walking into almost any one of 11 classrooms, one can immediately experience in microcosm a real sense of Catholic universality.

The variety of students and adults brought together through the commonality of their Catholic faith is mirrored in the makeup of a 30-member staff of religious education workers. Catechists and their supportive volunteers bring to their catechetical tasks a remarkable composite of competencies and background experiences.

The staff includes cradle Catholics and converts, mothers and fathers, college students and professors, secretaries and bankers, lawyers and teachers, an art dealer, an insurance executive, an actor, and a skillful photographer. Members of Sacred Heart’s pastoral staff are also active in the catechetical program and happily assist whenever they are asked to do so.

Sacred Heart’s religious education coordinator, Mrs. Faye Murphy, describes herself as a “Catholic convert who very innocently joined the staff at Sacred Heart on a temporary part-time experimental basis six years ago” and says she hasn’t had time since then to think of anything else. She views her role as an administrator/educator whose principal function is to take the burden of detail work off the shoulders of teachers and parents so that they can focus their full attention on the instructional part of Sacred Heart’s catechetical program.

“Before I came into the Church as a Catholic convert,” says Faye; “I never gave much thought to miracles. But now, every fall, when these many talented people get together with this wide assortment of children and adults each week and the program begins to gel, I fell that a major miracle has occurred!”