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CHAPTER 3

The Child of Immigrants Gives Back

Elias Josue Moo

That Elias Josue Moo went to Catholic school for 13 years and never once heard of the University of Notre Dame may strike some as odd. But Elias grew up in a distinctive kind of Catholic enclave in Oxnard, California. His parents both came to this country from Mexico when they were 17; his father came as a farmworker and his mother came to work with her grandparents on a ranch tending to racehorses. They raised five children in their Charismatic Catholic household. They struggled to send Elias and his siblings to Catholic school and when, during his senior year, Notre Dame came knocking with a generous financial-aid package, he took the plunge. Elias had never been away from home for more than a night, let alone several months at a time in a new state. His path, in retrospect, seems almost divinely inspired.

Since graduating from Notre Dame in 2007, Elias has been working at St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Denver. He first taught 23 fifth-graders and is now teaching eighth grade in this primarily Latino community whose median family income is $18,000 a year. Elias’s degree from Notre Dame and his training through the university’s ACE program have allowed him to give back in a way that he never could have imagined. His vocation has truly transformed his life.

Elias recalls growing up in a parish that had a lot of lay involvement in its day-to-day affairs. “The priests were great, and we were one of the few parishes that had two priests, but at the same time, they were very supportive of laypeople. They worked very closely with laity, and the laity were what kept the parish running.”

In fact, Elias’s mother was a lay preacher in the Charismatic movement. His parents pushed Elias and his siblings to get as involved in Church life as they could. His first official role was as an altar server. When he wanted to quit that position as an adolescent, his parents made him stay. While many of his peers moved away from the Church in reaction to such strictures, Elias’s teenage rebellion was a rebellion within the Church. He needed to find a role that felt meaningful to him, personally.

During the confirmation program at his parish, he got interested in youth ministry. He subsequently became a youth minister and even helped teach some of the First Communion classes. “That was one of the very first things I started doing for myself. It set the groundwork for my Catholic college experience.”

While Elias always felt at home at his parish, school was harder. He excelled academically, but he recalls having difficulty fitting in because of his background. “There were a lot of times where my dad would come to school straight from work, and the other kids would ask why he looked so dirty.” His school was mostly middle class and white, but his family spoke Spanish at home and practiced Mexican traditions. Elias recalls having “a lot of identity issues, especially in elementary school.” But he thinks that his “Catholic education, more than anything, helped me to embrace the best of both worlds.”

And there was a lot of pressure on him to succeed, no matter what tensions he may have felt. “In the community I grew up in,” he recalls, “you didn’t hear of many Latinos graduating from high school and making it on to college.” But he says that his Catholic education “instilled in me the values for success.” The schools he attended “enriched” his faith and helped him develop high academic standards. His teachers told him that “anything is possible.” But success constituted something very specific in the minds of Elias’s teachers. “It’s the idea of graduating from college and then coming back and doing something for the community,” Elias remembers.

He first heard about Notre Dame at a college fair. His mother watched a video about the school, Elias recalls, and “she fell in love with it.” Notre Dame was a struggle for Elias in the beginning. He was homesick. He says he felt the absence of his siblings most acutely. Elias says he comes “from a home where your family is everything, and if you’re not with them, then there’s a huge chunk of your life that’s missing.” Academically, Notre Dame was also an uphill battle.

Elias’s freshman year was the first time in his life he didn’t attend Mass every Sunday. He was stuck, emotionally and spiritually. But soon enough, he felt himself returning to Catholicism, “really looking for opportunities within my faith.” He became a Eucharistic minister in his dorm. And he found the Center for Social Concerns. The service projects and activities at the center “opened up a whole new avenue to explore my faith,” says Elias. “You can discover Christ through adoration; you can discover Christ through retreats and experiences like that. But to discover Christ through service was something very different for me.”

When he went on a mission to California to evangelize migrant workers, it was a totally new religious experience: “It was just like talking to people who were just like my dad, but in a different light—through a lens of Catholic social teaching and social justice.” For the next three years, Elias was involved in service on campus wherever he could find it. He participated in community organizing and tutored children in nearby school districts.

In his senior year, he applied to ACE and to Teach for America. Elias then remembers sitting down with John Staud, the director of ACE, who told him, “You know we don’t want you to just be a teacher. We want you to be a Catholic teacher. We want you to teach kids math, reading, and writing. But we also want you to be someone who teaches them how to be a better follower of Christ.” Elias recalls, “That sold me right away.”

So in the fall of 2007, after a summer of intensive training, Elias was placed at St. Rose in Denver. “It’s the greatest challenge I’ve ever encountered.” The kids in his first class were coming from gang-infested neighborhoods, and before they were even teenagers, they already had a tough reputation they wanted to uphold.

One boy raised his hand on the first day, Elias recalls, and said, “I get detentions a lot every year, so you and I are going to have some problems.” In fact, the teachers who had taught this particular class for the previous three years had all left at the end of the year. The kids were proud to think they had driven those teachers out.

Elias relied on his training in classroom management from ACE, and he took the advice of the school’s principal to heart: “Don’t smile with these kids until Christmas.” Elias recalls that he “may have cracked a few smiles before then, but the kids knew right away that I had a plan and that this was what I was asking them to do, and if they didn’t do it, there were going to be consequences.” Though he says his performance the first year “was by no means perfect,” he never lowered his expectations for his students. “Aim high, miss low” remains his guiding philosophy.

Elias’s day at St. Rose begins at 7:30 in the morning. School starts at 8:15. He takes the kids through all their subjects. But at a school like St. Rose, the teachers don’t just leave at the end of the day. During the first part of the year, Elias provides kids with an opportunity to do homework after school in his classroom. When the kids began talking about their homes, he realized that many of them didn’t really have a place to study quietly. Once a week after school, he meets with the student council for an hour and a half. Then he coaches the girls’ basketball team. He is regularly on campus until 9 p.m. with games and practices. This year, he is getting the chess club off the ground as well.

Faith plays an important role in the daily schedule of his class. They start the morning in prayer, they pray before lunch, and they pray before they leave at the end of the day. Elias has set up an altar in his classroom and has told the kids they can bring in pictures of loved ones they’d like to pray for. According to Elias, the kids really embraced this idea. They brought candles and images of saints and Mary. They also chose a classroom patron saint. “Our Lady of Guadalupe became the model for our classroom,” says Elias, who asked the students to consider whether their behavior was reflecting her qualities and the qualities of Juan Diego, who was asked to carry her message.

“Are we being humble? Are we willing to serve? Are we willing to be the messengers of God?” Elias wants his students to know that even though others may try to put them down for coming from poor neighborhoods or for speaking Spanish or having immigrant parents, “they have the potential for greatness.”

Elias teaches religion to his students every day. They talked about God when he explained the concept of infinity in math class. They talked about the conquest of the Aztecs at the hands of the Spanish missionaries during social-studies class. And Elias recalls being very impressed with the way his students asked about the morality of the conquistadors.

At the same time, Elias’s own faith has been affected by his role as a teacher. In college, when he discovered all of these different opportunities that the Catholic faith offered to laypeople like himself, he felt it was “a honeymoon stage.” He was completely enamored with everything about the faith. But his time at St. Rose has been the tough stuff of a long marriage. “It was very difficult to be a first-year teacher, going through all of the administrative and academic things I had to do, getting to know the curriculum and getting to know the students and their families. It was overwhelming.” He remembers a lot of long nights early on. And a lot of doubts—“doubts about whether or not I was being an effective teacher, whether I was doing what I needed to do.”

All his responsibilities and the demands of his job made him seek out more spiritual guidance. “I was attending Eucharist more often,” he recalls of his first year. Part of that was because he was teaching his kids about it. But he also found strength and support in the sacraments.

Most important, Elias says, he has also found a community with other ACE participants. He shared an apartment with a few other guys from the ACE program, and they had prayer together once a week. It was a “highlight,” says Elias. The “more reflective and meditative prayer was a great way to unwind. These opportunities really put me in my spiritual niche.”

And fortunately for Elias, those spiritual comrades have remained with him. Elias once thought he would leave Catholic education after a few years to go to law school or become a community organizer. However, he decided to stay at St. Rose for a third and now a fourth year, even though the ACE program only requires a two-year commitment. His roommates have decided to remain there as well. When the school’s principal asked what he wanted to do next year, Elias asked himself, “What is God calling me to do?” He has discovered a “passion for education, and, in particular, a passion for Catholic education.”

It sounds inspiring, but is it sustainable? If and when Elias settles down with a family, will they accept the kind of commitment he has made to St. Rose? The Church once had a large supply of free or cheap labor—nuns and priests. Today, 96 percent of Catholic-school teachers are laypeople. Like Elias, they typically work long hours for little pay. Elias doesn’t see this as a big problem though. He thinks there will always be people “willing to make some sacrifices for the greater good,” and there will always be young energetic people willing to heed the call. In his assessment, ACE and programs like it will be able to address the immediate needs of Catholic schools.

But he also foresees a need for a long-term plan. St. Rose has always worried about how it will stay open from one year to the next. The school is starting to raise money for an endowment. But Elias worries that Catholic education is not enough of a priority for some. “Catholic education definitely needs to take a front seat in anything that we do. And I think that if our Catholic schools are struggling, then our Church is struggling. Catholic schools are the way we bring people into the Church.”