 |
||
 |
||
|
NEW CHRISTMAS EVENT TO BENEFIT SCHOLARSHIPS
A new festive way to celebrate the Christmas season will be launched Tuesday, Dec. 12, when the Alive in Hope Foundation of the Diocese of Brooklyn inaugurates an annual Bishop’s Christmas Luncheon, which this year will benefit the Bishop’s Scholarship Program.
The holiday event will begin at noon in a recently opened venue, Abigail Kirsch’s Stage 6, at the Steiner Studios, a two-year-old motion picture production facility on Washington Ave. in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio will host the luncheon, whose proceeds will help children of low-income families attend a parochial school in Brooklyn and Queens. He will present two awards, and the program will include a children’s Nativity pageant and a choral presentation.
Chosen to receive the Emma A. Daniels Benefactor’s Award are Susan and Vincent Rohan, who continue the late Miss Daniels’ charitable work through the May Ellen and Gerald Ritter Foundation. The Pope John II Distinguished Stewardship Award will be presented to attorney and business leader Joseph M. Mattone, Sr., for his “gifts of time, talent and treasure” to the Diocese over many years.
The master of ceremonies, Maurice DuBois, co-anchor of “CBS 2 News This Morning,” will introduce the program, which will begin with the National Anthem sung by Dominique Krol, a ten-year-old fifth-grader of St. Bernard’s School, Mill Basin. Under contract with The Metropolitan Opera, she is currently singing in “Tosca.”
Toward the conclusion of the program, 35 fourth-graders from Mary Queen of Heaven School in Mill Basin, dressed in costumes, will act out the Gospel infancy narrative, which Bishop DiMarzio will read. They will close by singing “Joy to the World,” then lead the guests in “Silent Night.”
When the more than 250 guests arrive at the luncheon, they will hear Christmas liturgical music from the 12th to the 20th centuries performed by 22 voices of the choir of the Oratory Church of St. Boniface Church in downtown Brooklyn, led by Dennis Delaney.
.‘The spirit of St. Nicholas inspires us to share our gifts in gratitude for what we have received and, most importantly, for what those gifts will do for others, in this case the children who benefit from the Bishop’s Scholarship Fund,” Msgr. John J.Bracken, who chairs the Alive in Hope Foundation, said.
By launching a new tradition through the Christmas luncheon, “we would like to make sure that the bounty of this Christmas season will be enjoyed by the young throughout the year and for the rest of their lives,” he said.
For ticket information, contact Thomas Flood, Stewardship and Development Office, (718) 965-7300.
* * * * *
11/28/06
|
|
|
||