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.
“Bodily offspring I do not leave, but mental offspring I do. Well, my books do not have to be sent to school and college, and then insist on going into the church, or take to drinking, or marry their mother’s maid.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is like robbing the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit in the market place, of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)