Bert L’Homme is a lifelong educator and a lifelong Catholic. In July 2010, he was named superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Washington, and his career finally crossed paths with his faithful calling. L’Homme, 60, is also an ordained deacon at St. Francis de Sales parish in Northeast Washington. He sat down with The Washington Examiner to share his faith and the work it inspires.Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I am a Catholic. I have always been a Catholic. I was raised in a French Canadian Catholic family in Massachusetts where the church was the center of our life. It’s basic to who I am.
When I’m at Mass and celebrating the Eucharist — well, it’s often described as “the sum and the summit of our existence.” Everything we as Catholics do is focused on this sacrifice of love which Jesus left to us at the last supper. He knew he would soon leave the Earth, suffer greatly, and die and rise from the dead — and he knew he’d leave to us this heavenly food as nourishment.
Did any one person or event especially influence you – either faithfully or vocationally?
My job has always been more than a job, it’s always been a mission to work with troubled and delinquent children and adolescents. And that comes directly from my faith, which says that we are our brothers’ keepers, and it comes from my belief that Jesus called me to do this work. That mission is based on Matthew 28:19-20: Go and baptize in the name of the Lord, and teach them everything I’ve commanded you. That’s been the driving force behind everything I’ve been able to do in the last 32 years.
It’s been enormously difficult — and I think the good Lord could have directed me along an easier route. But for that reason, it’s been that much more rewarding.
What can a faithful teacher – or a Catholic teacher, specifically – bring to a classroom that a secular teacher cannot?
In an overt way, a Catholic school teacher can bring faith to the classroom. In Catholic schools, the primary task of the teacher — and of the principal and the superintendent — is to raise children in the faith of the church. When you’re doing discipline in the classroom, for example, where a public school teacher would talk about character traits, our teachers talk about the virtues that Paul wrote about in his letters. I think that’s more powerful because the Catholic children, like the teachers, have been baptized in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and they have the same responsibility not only to live as good Christians, but to evangelize, and each in our own way to share the stories of Jesus, and the stories in the Gospels.
News of Catholic schools in the Washington region in the past few years has been of closures and declining enrollment. When you envision the future of these schools, and of Catholic kids, how do you imagine it succeeding?
I do envision it succeeding, and I came and took this job to expand our ability to raise children in the faith because Catholic schools are the privileged place to learn the faith. I think the decreases in enrollment soon will level off, and we’ll stabilize our schools, especially now that a portion of every church’s offertory collection is directed to tuition assistance. Parishioners have taken a more comprehensive responsibility not only for educating their own children in the faith of the church, but all children. This year, the archdiocese awarded more than $5 million in tuition assistance, and that’s from parishioners who come to church and contribute to the cardinal’s annual appeal. That’s a responsibility that we are called to because Jesus called us to follow his word. We are compelled to keep our schools open and vital and growing.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that God so loves us that he sent his only son, Jesus, to die on the cross so that our sins are forgiven and we have eternal life.
– Leah Fabel
