Community School and Property
In order to provide a Catholic school for their children, in 1987 community members voted to purchase a wedged-shaped piece of land along Goshen Road on the northern perimeter of Montgomery Village. The Mother of God School began that Fall in an unused public school building in the Aspen Hill area of Montgomery County, Maryland, and two years later the School was transferred to the a newly built, three story structure on the purchased property in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
The third level of the School building was largely devoted to office space and the other two stories housed the School, K thru 8th Grade. A few years later a building with four classrooms and large gym with a vaulted ceiling was added to the School. Today the gym is not only used by the School, but is also used as a place of worship for a Byzantine Catholic community on Sunday mornings, for the Community’s weekly prayer meeting on Sunday evenings, and for other activities. Originally, as another Catholic school was being built for parishes in the northern part of Montgomery County, the Archdiocese of Washington had requested that the Mother of God School be restricted to Community members and their children. However, it is now open to all children and, although still a private Catholic School, it is affiliated with the Archdiocesan School System and tries to adhere to that System's policies. The School now has a sizable pre-K program as well.
At the same time that the School was built there was erected on the property a three story, monastic like residence which contains five apartments, a large chapel, living room, library, and a common kitchen and dining room. The residence, now known as “Goshen House,” is the center for many community gatherings and has been the home of various couples, singles, priests, and consecrated religious who have felt called to live together in Christ in a more immediate sense just as Jesus lived with and formed his early disciples in a common lifestyle. At one time Joe Difato and his family had lived in one of the apartments.
It is a coincidence that the Mother of God Community property is directly across the street from a parish site, St. John Neumann Catholic Church, where most Community members also attend.
Read more about this topic: Mother Of God Community
Famous quotes containing the words community, school and/or property:
“When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 17:14,15.
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“Let’s call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a non-rigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. Of course we don’t require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.... When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.”
—Saul Kripke (b. 1940)