By Mark Pattison
WASHINGTON (CNS) – The National Catholic Educational Association says Catholic schools have recovered more quickly from the pandemic than its public school counterparts.

The successes, according to the NCEA, go across the board when looking separately at Black students, Hispanic students, students from low-income households, and students who qualify for free and reduced-price meals.

The scores were first reported in October by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, colloquially known as “The Nation’s Report Card.” The numbers tracked the progress, or lack thereof, in math and reading by both fourth graders and eighth graders.

While Catholic schools’ scores are generally better than those of their public school counterparts – Annie Smith, NCEA vice president of data and research, said eighth graders pre-COVID-19 were about 5% better in math and 6% better in reading – the new numbers, based on testing conducted in 2021, showed a wider separation between the two.

Catholic schools’ scores have pretty much bounced back to the levels they had achieved prior to the coronavirus pandemic’s onset in March 2020. The only area that is still not up to snuff is eighth-grade math, which is still five points behind pre-pandemic levels.

Even so, said NCEA president Lincoln Snyder, those numbers are 15 points ahead of the comparable figures reported by public schools.

“It wasn’t a surprise to me at all,” Snyder told Catholic News Service in an Oct. 28 phone interview. “We’ve been monitoring testing data, really, throughout COVID.”

The NAEP numbers, Snyder said, bear out what a private firm found in 2021 when it conducted a lateral study of 3 million U.S. students to assess learning loss.

Given the upheaval wrought by the pandemic within society in general, and education in particular, Snyder said, “you would expect all students to have some learning loss.” But it was the ability to bounce back that characterized much of Catholic education, he added.

“It’s a testament to our educators to meet in person as soon as possible,” Snyder said. “It greatly did improve our Catholic school outcomes.”

The NAEP numbers dovetail with the NCEA’s own census showing that, for the first time in 20 years, enrollment in Catholic schools across the United States increased by 62,000. The number of Catholic schools also stayed steady, as 50 new schools were created to offset the closing of 50 other schools.
“We did have a big uptick in enrollment. We had an initial drop. In March of ‘20, when we went to distance learning, people were fearful for losing their jobs. Or they did lose their jobs, but they quickly recovered. “

“Our retention of those new families was very high,” Snyder told CNS, citing a rate of 90% percent and “some dioceses were really as high as 98%.”

“They fell in love with the school, but they also stayed because of the community. This is a real opportunity for us to shine,” he said.

Only about one-third of dioceses had reported enrollment numbers for the current school year to the NCEA. A final tally is not expected until the spring.

Smith told CNS in a Nov. 1 phone interview that for Catholic schools to get back to their 2019 achievement levels, “our teachers are doing what they need to do already. They’re in the classroom, they’re working with students, they’re creating individualized learning plans.”

She confessed to being “a little disappointed with the drop in the eighth-grade math” scores, but “they’re going to graduate into our high schools, so we’re going to make sure this doesn’t have a long-term impact.”

Snyder said the NCEA has to “do a good job of telling our story.”

“I think we have a very compelling story to tell,” he explained. “We educate the whole children. We teach them to be servant leaders in Christ. Our teachers really model that servant leadership. I think they were committed to an adult that was committed to them. They can see that commitment and they responded to it.”

By Catholic News Service

BALTIMORE – Gathered in Baltimore for their fall general assembly Nov. 14-17, the bishops elected new leadership, heard about the crisis in Ukraine and what’s facing migrants at the U.S. southern border.
They also approved several liturgical items and OK’d the advancement of the sainthood causes of three Catholic women.

The prelates also discussed whether they should update “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” their document on the political responsibility of Catholics that they issue every four years for the presidential election.

By an overwhelming majority, the bishops voted to reissue the teaching document without revisions but to add supplemental materials and begin a process of reexamining the teaching document following the 2024 election.

Speaking from the floor, several bishops said it must include what Pope Francis has said on critical issues of the day in his nearly 10 years as the successor to Peter.

But beyond the business agenda the bishops must attend to every year, there was a greater emphasis on prayer throughout their four days together and changes in seating arrangements to promote “fraternal dialogue.”

In the ballroom of the hotel where the assembly takes place, round tables replaced long rows of tables and chairs focused on the stage where USCCB leaders led proceedings.

Each day of the meeting ended with vespers and throughout the plenary, there also was 24-hour eucharistic adoration, which was instituted at their 2021 assembly. There were also less formal bishop-media encounters.

Their first public session took place the afternoon of Nov. 15 and opened with an address by Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio, followed by Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the outgoing president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The nuncio told the bishops that “as we live through a time of accelerated change,” spreading the Gospel message is particularly important.

One way to determine if the church is following its missionary role is to look at how local churches are functioning as evangelizing communities, something he said is especially evident in the current eucharistic revival in the United States.

In his final presidential address, Archbishop Gomez described images of conflict, changes and challenges he saw during his three-year term.

He spoke of the pandemic, “a long season of unrest in our cities,” a contentious presidential election as well as “deepening political, economic and cultural divisions,” war in Europe, a refugee crisis and “the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”

He raised alarm over what he saw as a U.S. society moving “hard and fast toward an uncompromising secularism,” adding that “traditional norms and values are being tested like never before.”

In their elections, the bishops chose Archbishop Gomez’s successor – Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services. He was elected from a slate of 10 nominees, winning with 138 votes.

In subsequent voting, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore was elected USCCB vice president. He won the post on the third ballot by 143-96 in a runoff with Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana.

The outgoing USCCB officers completed their three-year terms at the conclusion of the assembly, and their successors began their three-year terms.

Archbishop Broglio told reporters a few hours after he was elected that he is willing to meet with public officials, including President Joe Biden, to discuss public policy issues of concern to the church.

“I don’t see my role as political, but if there is any way to insert the Gospel into all aspects of life in our country, I certainly will not miss any occasion to do that,” he said, adding that Archbishop Gomez had desired to meet with Biden, but that such an opportunity did not present itself since Biden’s election two years ago.

The afternoon public session ended with an acknowledgement of the 20th anniversary of the drafting and passage of the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” with prayer and reflection led by Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey.

The prelates also heard poignant remarks from Mark Williams, a survivor of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest. He told the bishops he was “grateful and encouraged by the work you are doing to rid abuse from our beloved church.”

Bishop James V. Johnston Jr. of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, outgoing chairman of the Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People, said the past 20 years have been a time of growth, awareness, examination and conversion as the church has worked to provide a safe environment and restore justice.

During their public sessions Nov. 15 and 16, the bishops heard several reports, including on:

– Preparations for the next October’s world Synod of Bishops on synodality:
Work is proceeding – and quickly, according to Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, chairman of the bishops’ doctrine committee. Diocesan listening sessions concluded this fall. He said dioceses “managed to host over 30,000 listening sessions and other means of coming together.” Now comes “the continental stage” of consultations.

– The ongoing war in Ukraine:
Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia asked his fellow U.S. bishops Nov. 16 to pray for Ukraine, and, if possible, to go to Ukraine and pray there for its people. What Ukrainians are facing amounts to genocide, he said. He thanked the bishops and their leadership for spearheading U.S. Catholic support for a nation under attack by Russia since February.

– The three-year National Eucharistic Revival, which is now under way at the diocesan level and will culminate in the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in 2024:
Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, which is spearheading the revival, said the revival has “incredible momentum.” The ultimate goal, he said, is that this “this encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist” will move Catholics who have been part of this experience to be missionary disciples who would in turn lead others to the faith.

– The pro-life landscape after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade:
Archbishop Lori, speaking as outgoing chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said that in a year when abortion has been front and center in U.S. politics – from the Supreme Court decision to recent state referendums – the Catholic Church faces a challenge of promoting its pro-life message to its own members and society at large.

“We have more work to do,” he said, but stressed church leaders must must remain united in their efforts to “proclaim the Gospel of life and defend human life at every stage.”

Among liturgical action items before them, the bishops approved English and Spanish versions of “Lay Ministry to the Sick,” a collection of texts taken from other liturgical books. They also approved new Mass texts for the feasts of Our Lady of Loreto (Dec. 10) and the recently canonized St. Paul VI (May 29).

The approved texts now advance to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Sacraments for a “recognitio” before they can be used in the United States.

The bishops also gave their assent in voice votes to the advancement of three sainthood causes:
– Mother Margaret Mary Healy Murphy, founder of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate, the first order of women religious in the state of Texas.
– Cora Louise Evans, a California laywoman who was a wife, a mother and possible mystic.
– North Dakota laywoman Michelle Duppong.

(Contributing to this report were Carol Zimmermann, Rhina Guidos, Dennis Sadowski and Mark Pattison.)

WASHINGTON (CNS) – The National Prayer Vigil for Life held each January will continue even with the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade because there is “still a great need for prayer and advocacy”‘ to end abortion and protect the unborn and their mothers, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said Nov. 11.

The vigil is hosted in Washington by the USCCB Secretariat of Pro-life Activities, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and The Catholic University of America’s Office of Campus Ministry.

Scheduled for Jan. 19-20 at the national shrine, the vigil has always coincided with the eve of the March for Life, which marks the date of 1973 decision of the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. The 2023 March for Life is Jan. 20.

“The National Prayer Vigil is a time to praise God for the great gift of the recent Supreme Court Dobbs decision, overturning the tragic Roe v. Wade decision made almost a half-century ago,” said Kat Talalas, assistant director of pro-life communications at the USCCB.

“State and federal legislators are now free to embrace policies that protect preborn children and their mothers,” she said in a statement. “Yet, there is still a great need for prayer and advocacy from the faithful, as there will be intensified efforts to codify Roe in legislation and policies at the state and federal levels.”

She added that “many prayers and sacrifices are needed to transform our culture so that all may cherish the gift of human life and offer life-giving support to vulnerable women, children, and families.”

The opening Mass for the vigil will take place at 5 p.m. (EST) Jan. 19 with Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, as the principal celebrant and homilist.

The Mass will be immediately followed by a Holy Hour for life. This will start off a series of nationwide holy hours throughout the night from dioceses across the country, which will be broadcast on the USCCB’s website, www.usccb.org. 

The nationwide vigil concludes at 8 a.m. (EST) Jan. 20 with a closing Mass to be celebrated by Auxiliary Bishop Joseph L. Coffey of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services.

A live television broadcast of the vigil will be provided by the Eternal Word Television Network and will be available via livestream on the national shrine’s website, https://www.nationalshrine.org/mass.

The USCCB pro-life secretariat also is encouraging Catholics across the country to observe a nationwide prayer vigil from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 to pray for an end to abortion and “a greater respect for all human life.”

(Editor’s Note: More details on the National Prayer Vigil for Life in Washington can be found at https://www.usccb.org/prolife/annual-pro-life-events.)

By Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON – Four new awardees were named this year as recipients of People of Life Awards, chosen by the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities for lifetime contributions to the pro-life cause.
Honored at a July dinner for diocesan pro-life leaders and their guests, Mary Huber, Barbara Lyons, Greg Schleppenbach, and the late Laura Jean Ebert joined 37 other recipients since the secretariat established the award in 2007.

The award recognizes Catholics who have answered the call outlined by St. John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical “The Gospel of Life” by dedicating themselves to pro-life activities and promoting respect for the dignity of the human person. It is bestowed in honor of their significant and longtime contributions to the culture of life.

Huber spent her 24-year career in pro-life ministry at the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, beginning as a part-time bookkeeper and ultimately becoming the director of Respect Life and Pastoral Care for the diocese’s Department of Life, Dignity and Justice.

Huber worked closely with the California Catholic Conference of Bishops advocating for life-saving protections for unborn children, women, and teen girls at risk for abortion and the elderly at risk for assisted suicide.

She launched the first diocesan Project Rachel program, coordinating training for priests and volunteers and providing bilingual phone counseling as well as abortion healing retreats in English and Spanish.
Huber also facilitated mental health programming in parish ministries, particularly for those wounded by abortion, or struggling with end-of-life care. She ultimately developed comprehensive programs to provide educational resources for accompanying the dying during their final journey.

Lyons began pro-life work in 1974 as volunteer president of the Milwaukee County chapter of Wisconsin Right to Life. She joined the staff of Wisconsin Right to Life in 1977 where she served as legislative director for 10 years, becoming executive director in 1987.

She also led educational outreach through the Veritas Society media campaign and teen and college training programs.

She “retired” from Wisconsin Right to Life in 2014 after 40 years of work in the pro-life movement, yet in her 70s, she was asked to serve as coalitions director for the Patient’s Rights Action Fund. She has worked tirelessly into her 80s to prevent vulnerable persons from being targeted by assisted suicide.

Schleppenbach has dedicated his career to pro-life advocacy. He directed the pro-life office at the Nebraska Catholic Conference from 1991 to 2014 and served as Nebraska Catholic Conference’s executive director for two years.

From 2016 to 2022, Schleppenbach was associate director for the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. He is currently the executive director for the Culture Project, a missionary organization providing education and mentorship for teens on the issues of human dignity and sexual integrity.

Ebert, who passed away in 2021, spent her life in dedicated service to the Catholic Church and the pro-life movement. She helped establish pro-life pregnancy centers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Canada. She also served as a housemother at a maternity home in Arkansas.

She was also passionate about Catholic education and worked for many years as a teacher in Illinois. She continued her leadership in compassionate service to women and children at pregnancy care centers near her home of Menominee, Michigan, until her death at age 73.

WASHINGTON (CNS) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade “is, without question, an answer to prayer,” but in a post-Roe world, “Catholics must now work together for another, even deeper paradigm shift,” said the U.S. bishops’ pro-life chairman.

“We must move beyond a paradigm shift in the law in order to help the people of our nation better see who we can be as a nation by truly understanding what we owe to one another as members of the same human family,” said Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-life Activities.

“To build a world in which all are welcome,” he said, Catholics “must heed” the words of St. Teresa of Kolkata “and remember ‘that we belong to one another.'”

“We must shift the paradigm to what St. John Paul II described as ‘radical solidarity,’ making the good of others our own good, including especially mothers, babies – born and preborn – and families throughout the entire human lifespan,” Archbishop Lori said.

He made the remarks in a Sept. 21 statement for the U.S. Catholic Church’s observance of Respect Life Month, which is October. The theme of the observance is “Called to Serve Moms in Need.”

The first Sunday of October is designated as Respect Life Sunday, which is Oct. 2 this year.

In their June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a majority of the justices ended the court’s nearly 50-year nationwide “regime of abortion on demand,” the archbishop said.

This “regime” was “based on the indefensible view that the U.S. Constitution implicitly forbids government from protecting the preborn child in the womb from the violence of abortion,” he said.

The court “concluded that there is nothing in the Constitution’s text, history, American legal tradition or the court’s precedents that justified the extreme holding of Roe,” he said.

Dobbs was a challenge to a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. The court affirmed the law 6-3 and also voted 5-4 to overturn the 1973 Roe ruling, which legalized abortion nationwide, and 1992’s Casey v. Planned Parenthood ruling, which affirmed Roe.

The ruling returned the issue of abortion to the states.

With Dobbs, the high court “cleared the way for a paradigm shift in American law, allowing it to enlarge its boundaries to again welcome a segment of the human family that had been outside of its protections for close to half a century,” he added.

He called Dobbs “a victory for justice, the rule of law and self-governance.”

“But for those of us who have prayed for this moment to arrive, it is the time for a renewal and rededication of our efforts to build a culture of life and civilization of love,” he said. “Justice is, of course, essential to this end. But it is not sufficient.

“To build a world in which all are welcome requires not only justice, but compassion, healing, and above all, unconditional love.”

“Abortion is a gruesome sign of how we have forgotten our mutual belonging,” Archbishop Lori continued. “The logic of Roe v. Wade has framed our national discourse on the issue of abortion as a zero-sum conflict among individual strangers.”

But “mother and child are not strangers; they are already bound together by flesh and kinship,” he said. “The new life that is developing under the heart of the mother is already situated in a network of relations, including family, neighbors and fellow citizens.”

Roe’s logic “offers the woman only the right to see lethal force used against her child, but it otherwise abandons her,” he explained.

But “the logic of the culture of life recognizes that the pregnant woman and her child are not alone – they are fellow members of our larger human family whose interwoven vulnerability is a summons to all of us, but especially Catholics because of the teaching of Jesus and his proclamation of the Gospel of life,” the archbishop said.

To practice “radical solidarity and unconditional love in a post-Roe world,” he said, means speaking and living the truth” with compassion – the truth that abortion not only “unjustly kills a preborn child, but also gravely wounds women, men, families and the nation as a whole.”

Through law, policy, politics and culture, society must do whatever it can to provide mothers, children and families in need “with the care and support necessary for their flourishing throughout the entire arc of life’s journey,” he said.

“Building a world in which women are esteemed, children are loved and protected, and men are called to their responsibilities as fathers, requires us to understand and address the complex and tragic tangle of affliction and strife that culminates in the violence of abortion,” Archbishop Lori said. “This is a massive and daunting undertaking.”

“Catholics already have a strong foundation in the church’s centuries-long encouragement of parental and societal duties,” he said. “Millions of individual Catholics from all walks of life are already personally endeavoring to build the bonds of solidarity and compassion throughout our society.”

Many also are engaged in parish and community initiatives such as pregnancy resource centers, post-abortion counseling, he said, as well as Walking with Moms in Need, an initiative of the U.S. bishops to connect pregnant women and their families with parishes and to a growing network of resources.

(Editor’s Note: The full text of Archbishop Lori’s statement and Respect Life Month materials from the USCCB’s Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities can be found online at https://www.respectlife.org/respect-life-month.)

By Carol Zimmermann

WASHINGTON (CNS) – Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph, shows no signs of slowing down in her long-standing fight to end the death penalty. 

At 83, she is writing her fourth book while directing her advocacy organization, Ministry Against the Death Penalty, in New Orleans.

She spends a fair amount of time on the road as she continues to give talks, especially on college campuses, about the injustices she sees with capital punishment. She also continues to minister to both death-row inmates and murder victims’ families.

She has accompanied six men to their executions.

When asked by Catholic News Service in a Sept. 30 interview where she gets her energy, her responses all revolved around the work she does.

For starters, she said she is energized by those she ministers to on death row – currently a Louisiana inmate in his 60s, Manuel Ortiz. The Salvadoran has been on death row for close to 30 years and continues to claim innocence for the sentence he received for hiring someone to murder his wife. Sister Helen said Ortiz is a prayerful man with a great devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“How does he get up every morning in that cell 30 years now? How does anybody do that?” Sister Helen asked. She said she comes away more enlivened from every visit with him and is also overwhelmed by what he goes through – “knowing you’re innocent, knowing the lies they told about you in trial.”

His case, along with the 690 people currently on death row in this country, remind her “we’ve got our work cut out for us,” she said in her understated way. Her Louisiana drawl almost belies the urgency of the work she sees ahead.

Her passion for both the innocent and the guilty on death row – who all have God-given dignity, she points out – has been her driving force ever since she witnessed her first execution in 1984: the electrocution of Patrick Sonnier, a 34-year-man found guilty of killing two teenagers.

Sister Helen first came to know Sonnier as a pen pal, when she volunteered to write to someone on death row. From that correspondence she later became Sonnier’s spiritual adviser.

She has often referred to her decision to write to someone on death row as a move of “Sneaky Jesus,” saying Jesus sneaks up and draws you into doing something that seems small but in the end becomes life changing.

Because Sonnier wanted Sister Helen to be with him and to pray for him at his execution, Sister Helen agreed. But really, nothing could have prepared her for what she witnessed.

“What I saw set my soul on fire, a fire that burns in me still,” she wrote in her memoir, “River of Fire.”
After leaving the prison, in the middle of the night, she said she threw up in the parking lot. But from that day forward, she knew that she had to do something about what she had seen.

As she put it: “Our faith awakens and we speak.”

“I knew very few people were going to get this opportunity ever to be in (the execution chamber). I’m the witness,” she said, adding that she began to speak with whoever would listen.

At first, she encountered a lot of criticism with people shouting things at her like: “What do you know? What’s your authority? The Catholic Church upholds a right of the state to take life!”

She didn’t back down though.

“You just stay in there because you know what your eyes have seen, you know what your heart has felt you know what the Gospel of Jesus says about loving your enemy and forgiving.”

So she has stayed in there, and continues to do so, for nearly four decades. Starting with parish talks and then moving on to writing “Dead Man Walking” and speaking to St. John Paul II and Pope Francis about death penalty wrongs.

“Have to do it. Can’t not do it,” she said of her personal crusade.

The woman religious who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, entered the convent at 18 and spent years teaching in Catholic schools, has not held back in recounting details of what she has seen in state prisons in prisoners’ final moments.

In 1997, she told St. John Paul that she has walked behind a man on his way to be executed, with legs shackled, hands cuffed to a belt and surrounded by guards who whispered to her: “Please pray as I make this walk that God holds up my legs.”

“Where is the dignity in taking a human being and rendering them completely defenseless and killing them?” she said she asked the pope. “How do we respect the inviolable dignity even of the guilty? Can you help our church? Can you help us?”

And he did help, she said, in a 1999 visit to St. Louis where he described the death penalty as both cruel and unnecessary and said: “Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform.”
His 1995 encyclical, “Evangelium Vitae” (The Gospel of Life”), the pope spoke against the death penalty but he included the caveat that it could be used if absolutely necessary to defend society. Sister Helen said that phrase made her heart drop because she knew those words would be used by anyone who wanted to sentence someone to death.

She likened St. John Paul’s discussion of the death penalty to taking the issue to the net, then Pope Francis pushed it over the net in 2018. That was when he announced the revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to include a description of the death penalty as “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and saying it was inadmissible in all cases.

There’s no doubt Sister Helen was pretty happy that day. But by no means did she just take a break afterward.

She knows there is still plenty of support in the U.S. for capital punishment, even as some states are abolishing it, and that Catholics are not much different from the general public in their death penalty views.

A 2021 poll by Pew Research shows that 60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it. It also showed Catholics falling into that same bracket with 58% of them generally supportive of capital punishment, with 27% strongly favoring it.

When asked how to reach people in the pews, Sister Helen said they need to learn about the death penalty in Catholic schools and parish adult education program.

She says she is hardly alone in her advocacy but part of a broader movement. She likens it to “a pot that begins to boil and these little bubbles start at the bottom and they start rising up. Well, I was one of those little bubbles.”

And even now, the work doesn’t get old for her.

“There’s a great life when you feel you’re fulfilling your purpose,” she said, adding that she is glad to be awake to today’s social injustices even though she said it took 40 years to happen.

“It’s a great grace to be awake and then to be engaged in soul-sized stuff,” she said. “Bring it on.”

(Follow Zimmermann on Twitter: @carolmaczim)