CROWN POINT – If it had to do with youth catechesis in the past 45 years at Nativity of Our Savior in Portage or St. Mary in Crown Point, chances are excellent that Marian Weeks was involved.
After almost a half century of youth ministry work in the Diocese of Gary, Weeks is stepping away for a well-deserved rest, retiring as youth minister at St. Mary after 18 years, with 27 years at Nativity of Our Savior before that.
“All of my teachers (in) grade school and high school were priests and nuns, and I wanted to be a nun,” Weeks recalled of her early life in Johnstown, Penn. My father said I had to wait until after high school to enter the convent, so I started saving socks, because I thought they were all I would need.”
By the time she graduated, Weeks was still active in her parish, but “decided to do something else with my life.” She was offered an art scholarship, but as the youngest of eight children, knew her parents couldn’t afford to finance her continued education, so she went to work and met her husband, Dennis, a friend of her brother’s in the U.S. Marine Corps, marrying in 1968.
After the Johnstown flood in 1977, Dennis Weeks secured a company transfer to Northwest Indiana, but Marian did not want to move. “I kept saying that I was going back to Pennsylvania, but that fall I went to Mass at Nativity and Msgr. (Carl) Mengeling said they needed help teaching CCD classes,” recalled Marian Weeks. “I’d taught preschool and kindergarten CCD in Pennsylvania, and suddenly my sons sitting on either side both nudged me.
“I volunteered, and I sure got involved. I started teaching CCD, became a eucharistic minister, joined the Altar and Rosary Society, and began catering every Saturday with about a dozen other women,” Weeks explained. “I was the ‘dumpling and sauerkraut girl’ at the summer festivals, and founded a youth group that traveled to Colorado for World Youth Day (in 1993 with Pope John Paul II) and formed a service group, Helping the Elderly Attain Repairs Today (HEART) with about 40-50 members.”
Fundraisers paid expenses as parish youth went on week-long mission trips, learning to work with professionals on electrical work and pouring concrete to install sidewalks. “They met kids from around the country, ate together and slept in a school. There wasn’t one child that didn’t come back a changed person, appreciative of every little thing they had,” said Weeks.
Teens Encounter Christ (TEC) Retreats were held three times a year at different parishes in the diocese, while Weeks also led youth groups to diocesan Catholic Youth Xperience weekends at Valparaiso University.
After 25 years serving Nativity of Our Savior, Weeks retired, but it was short-lived.
Father Pat Kalich, now a senior priest, had moved from his second stint at Nativity to St. Mary, where he became pastor in 2004, and began calling Weeks at her Portage home to ask her to come out of retirement.
“I told him I didn’t want to drive on the expressways, and he even offered to teach me how to commute by using back roads,” she remembered. Father Kalich eventually prevailed, and Weeks arrived at St. Mary in 2006 as director of faith formation.
A year later, when the pastor asked what St. Mary needed, Weeks recommended a food pantry. “Our first parish council raised the question, ‘Does Crown Point need another food pantry?’ and the answer was ‘No, but St. Mary needs a food pantry,’” Father Kalich explained. “Key people went out to study other pantries and found they had lots of rules, and we didn’t want that, so we opened God’s Groceries, open to all.
“Then Marian said, let’s serve breakfast on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and the night before, all these young people came to prepare omelettes. Some didn’t know how to crack an egg, but what was remarkable is that not one of them pulled out a cell phone all evening. They didn’t need to be anywhere else,” Father Kalich recalled.
“St. Mary School students and CCD eighth graders made casseroles the night before, and on Saturday morning, our pantry clients were invited to breakfast,” Weeks noted. “The kids love it; they cook, serve the meal and eat with our guests. We usually have about 300 people, and may use as many as 75 dozen eggs, along with ham and sausage.”
Vacation Bible School under Weeks’ leadership at both Nativity and St. Mary included original themes developed by Weeks and her daughter, including songs, mottos, décor, activities and Bible lessons.
“One of my favorite themes was ‘Camping With Christ,’ Weeks said with a smile. “It rained every day that week in 2019, and we had to set up every activity for every age group in classrooms, including a Boy Scout campsite, but the kids had a great time.”
Father Kalich recalls as many as 200 summer campers, “and I think 100 of them were teenagers wanting to volunteer with the campers.”
Weeks’ youth group collected health and beauty aids annually for Catholic Charities clients, set up a Jesse Tree in the church to bring gifts to as many as 427 needy children through a variety of charities – family gifts that have included a TV, microwave oven and more than a dozen bicycles – and distributed hundreds of coats, collected by Weeks, at God’s Groceries every winter.
Teens at St. Mary annually collect Souper Bowl donations after Mass on the day of the NFL championship game, contributing as much as $5,341 in 2021 to God’s Groceries.
Weeks supervised high schoolers on a parish mission trip to the NPH orphanage in Guatemala when they asked for a mission trip, and supervised youth bake sales to sponsor two Guatemalan children with monthly donations and birthday and Christmas gifts.
St. Mary children collect pledges for the annual Teacher Walk-A-Thon, with Weeks cooking and faith formation teachers serving hot dogs and sloppy joes.
She hosted “Feed You Body and Feed Your Soul” dinners after Holy Thursday Masses, and prepared youths for reconciliation opportunities evert Lent and Advent. “I checked school records each fall and if I found Catholic parents whose students were missing baptismal records, I called and offered to prepare the children to be baptized, if they wanted it,” Weeks added.
One of her proudest accomplishments was encouraging a young law student to become a catechist one September years ago at Nativity, despite his doubts. “By December, he came to me and told me he felt a calling to the priesthood and asked me how to pursue it,” Weeks said. “I ended up driving him to visit St. Vincent College on a Pennsylvania trip I was taking, and from that faith formation experience, we got a diocesan priest, Father Brian Chadwick.”
It’s no surprise that Weeks’ favorite scripture passage is from Matt 5. “The Beatitudes awaken me to my total dependency on God. Through them, we are called to follow and act like Jesus even though we will meet with opposition. Follow the beatitudes and our reward will be great – the Kingdom of God is ours,” she said.
“Marian has a very mature spirituality,” said Father Kalich. Pope Francis said earlier this year that ‘Catholics do not proselytize, but evangelize by attraction to the beauty of God’s love,’ and I think that captures in a succinct way what Marian was about. She doesn’t try to bring attention to herself, but emerged as a wisdom figure for hundreds of people, and attracted hundreds of volunteers to the church.”