By Thea Jarvis

Getting ready for Easter this year meant more than hunting Cadbury eggs and marshmallow chicks for children at Holy Trinity Church in Peachtree City.

Youngsters in the parish school of religion focused their attention on the good work of Monsignor Aloysius Schwartz, founder of Asian Relief, Inc.

Monsignor Schwartz, the brother of Holy Trinity’s religious education director, Rose Herold, spent his priestly life founding schools, hospitals, shelters and homes for the poor, especially children, in Korea, the Philippines and Mexico. He died March 16 at the age of61 after a three-year battle with Lour Gherig’s disease.

Getting to know Monsignor Schwartz and his work “gave children a sense of what it means to be a missionary,” Mrs. Herold said.

In lieu of traditional Lenten rice bowl offerings, Father Edward O’Connor, pastor of Holy Trinity, permitted children to make “poor pouches,” small fabric money holders for sacrificial offerings. Mrs. Herold presented a brief outline of her brother’s ministry in talks to students and parents at the beginning of Lent.

“I had a hesitation to do this because it’s personal,” Mrs. Herold said. “If everyone comes in and does their own personal charities, we could be in big trouble.”

But encouraged by fellow staff members and given the nod by Father O’Connor, she plunged ahead.

In the end, “I was just dumbfounded,” she said, by the way students reacted. “The kids have been so enthusiastic, so involved” that teachers are talking about a follow-up so the children can learn more about how their donations are being put to use.

“The money came from giving up candy, ice cream, from raking leaves,” Mrs. Herold said. Students were encouraged to make personal sacrifices rather than ask others to make donations.

One personal sacrifice was made by Father O’Connor laughed. “One kid’s going to have me play Monopoly.”

Nominated twice for a Nobel Peace Prize, Monsignor Schwartz was a graduate of the University of Louvain, Belgium, where he studied theology. A native of Washington, D.C., he was ordained in 1967 and began ministry in Korea.

“From the very earliest, he always wanted to go to the missions,” his sister remembered. For him, she said, mission work was a way to live out the social gospel of Jesus.

His work targeted the poor and powerless. As it grew and flourished, Monsignor Schwartz founded the Sisters of Mary, now numbering over 200 women, and the Brothers of Christ, now a community of 12 men.

He expanded his ministry to the Philippines in the early 1980s at the invitation of Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila. There, as in Korea, he built homes for deprived and abandoned children, full-service hospitals and specialized treatment centers for the poor.

He was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gherig’s disease, in 1989. He kept up an active pace, however, beginning construction of Boystown and Girlstown facilities in Mexico.

ALS attacks the nervous system and eventually results in total paralysis. In the last years of his life, Monsignor Schwartz was increasingly handicapped by his illness, but continued to celebrate Mass and visit mission outposts.

“He made these trips when he was…paralyzed,” Mrs. Herold explained. “The work he (did) was incredible.”

Visiting her brother in the Philippines two years ago, she said, was “mind-boggling. I had no idea of the magnitude of what he had accomplished.”

She was also struck by the spirituality of the Sisters of Mary and the discipline of the children in their care, she said.

Mrs. Herold described her brother, the third of seven children in their family, as “a simple, low-keyed person.”

“God gave him a job to do and he did it.”

He was, she indicated, embarrassed by any honor that came his way because of the work he felt called to do.

In 1975, he became the first non-Korean to receive that country’s highest civilian honor, the president’s medal. He received the Magasaysay Award for International Understanding in 1983. The award, the Peace Prize, included a $20,000 grant, which Monsignor Schwartz used to expand an Asian Relief facility for homeless and destitute men in Seoul.

The priest was first nominated for the Nobel in 1984 by U.S. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. He was nominated for the second time this February by Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer.

“Monsignor Schwartz’s approach to the service of the poor is very dynamic and remarkably effective,” Schaefer wrote to the Nobel selection committee. “Schwartz’s programs are truly unique both in nature and scope and are unequaled anywhere in the world in their effectiveness and their totally modern approach to service of the poor.”

Monsignor Schwartz combined a head for business with a heart full of empathy and compassion.

“Not since the death in the early 1960s of lay Catholic doctor Tom Dooley has a Catholic missionary caught the imagination and touched the hearts of ordinary people in Europe and America,” said a February 1992 article in The Catholic Standard, newspaper of the Washington, D.C. archdiocese.

In a video made five months before his death, Monsignor Schwartz thanked friends and benefactors who had supported his work over the years and begged them not to forget “my children.”

He spoke of the thousands of children abandoned on the streets of Mexico City, where the most recent Asian Relief centers have been constructed.

“The poverty here is staggering,” he said. Children in the new Boystown and Girlstown were “malnourished, out of school, with no hope for the future.”

Seated in a wheelchair for support, periodically sipping water through a straw to assuage his constricted throat, Monsignor Schwartz nevertheless makes his point clearly and well.

“Now I am almost totally paralyzed. My voice grows weaker by the day.”

He said he has been known as something of an idealist, but “I am very much a realist as well.”

“I know that these programs begin with food on the table and money in the bank,” he said, expressing his hope that the work continue despite the absence of his physical presence.

Monsignor Schwartz was buried in the Philippines March 25 after a nine-day wake.

He was “a very special man God has blessed,” Mrs. Herold said of her brother. “We buried a saint.”

In the Catholic standard interview, Monsignor Schwartz had spoken of his personal pain and loss, admitting it is sometimes “ terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

One of the things her brother missed most during his illness, Mrs. Herold said, was running, which had become a life-habit, providing him physical and mental regeneration.

Monsignor Schwartz saw his suffering as a way to identify with and understand the physical helplessness and abandonment of those he cared for, he said in the Catholic Standard interview.

“There is a deep sense of peace which comes from the feeling that you are in harmony with the will of God,” he said of the work he had done.

“The cost is frightening,” but there is “a great deal of peace in this.”