Sixth Multi-Parish Academy to Open in Diocese

When Divine Mercy Catholic Academy in Ozone Park greets its first classes of students in September, it will become the sixth multi-parish elementary school in the Diocese of Brooklyn – and the first in Queens – to be designated as an academy. Five were created in the last two years.

At the end of the school year, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary School and St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr School will cease to exist, to be succeeded by the academy, whose charter is expected to be approved by the State Board of Regents this month.

Initially, the pastors of the two parishes – Msgr. Gregory C. Wielunski of Nativity and Father James J. Meszaros of St. Stanislaus – will comprise the academy’s board of directors.

A search committee interviewed five applicants for the position of school principal, including Sister Marguerite Torre, of the Ursuline Sisters, Nativity’s current principal. Sister Marguerite was offered a position as director of development for the academy, but chose to decline it.

The new principal, Sister Francis Marie Wystepek, of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, is currently principal of St. Stanislaus School and will now report to the board of pastors. A lay advisory board that will be formed in the coming months will provide guidance, support and advice to the principal and the board of directors.

In the school year that began in the fall of 2006, when the two parishes entered a successful cooperative educational venture for their schools, the Nativity school building has been serving students from kindergarten to

the fifth grade, while the program for grades six to eight is housed in the school building of St. Stanislaus parish. This will continue as the configuration of the academy. A nursery/prekindergarten program is also planned. Registration of children for the new school year is in progress.

Because it involves more than one parish, the school is called an academy to differentiate it from a single-parish school.

Its name was proposed by Msgr. Wielunski who said that Divine Mercy, the popular devotion promoted by Saint Faustina, an early 20th-century nun, has attracted the attention of many ethnic groups, including new ones that have settled in the Ozone Park area. He said the words attached to the devotion, “Jesus, I Trust in You,” would be “an appropriate motto for the new educational endeavor.”

Since 2005, the academies that have been established in Brooklyn have included Flatbush Catholic Academy, SS. Joseph and Dominic Catholic Academy in Williamsburg, St. Mary Mother of Jesus-St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Academy in Bensonhurst and Midwood Catholic Academy. Northside Catholic Academy in Williamsburg came into being in 1999.

Another academy, Visitation in Bay Ridge, is a private school conducted by the Visitation Sisters. Not parish-related, it has been operated by the Visitation Sisters as a Catholic school since 1855.

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