If you haven’t heard, Pope Francis will probably be visiting Philadelphia next year. Last month, Mayor Nutter, Archbishop Chaput and other Philadelphian officials traveled to Rome and invited him.

“I have great confidence that he’ll come” says Chaput to NBCPhiladelphia. “We will meet privately with the holy father, and share with him the great excitement and momentum surrounding the meeting in Philadelphia.”

Pope Francis has attracted a lot attention from the media worldwide, including our own school’s paper. This will likely be an event that’ll be experienced by millions and seen by billions.

There are already many plans set up for this once-in-a-lifetime occasion. The whole visit will last six days. It will feature many guest speakers and faith-based breakout sessions for families. Instead of the Vatican funding this event, however, the archdiocese of Philadelphia will raise a significant amount of money to allow this to happen. So far, over $5 million has been raised, but that’s not even close to the final cost.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has been facing financial issues, affecting many Catholic schools under them, but Archbishop Chaput doesn’t seem to be worried since “”The holy father likes things simple”.

I was able to get a hold of Mr. Boyce, who was more than happy to share his thoughts on how Malvern should honor this event:

JS:  I’m sure that you know the pope is coming to visit Philly next year. How do you think Malvern should welcome him, or what Malvern should do for the week he’s there?

RB: I think there should be an opportunity, in one of the events [of the visit], that the student body at Malvern should be able and proactively participated in. It may not be the whole campus, but it should be a [significant] part of it, and in preparation for that, we should prepare some token of our faithfulness to the Church that we should prepare or have visible to him. I’ve had the opportunity to be in the Vatican, for papal masses and things like that, and its such an inspiration to sit there surrounded by your contemporaries and, here the contemporaries would by the Malvern student body, [they would] show him that the faith is alive and well in the youth of America.

JB: So I guess you’re saying that it’d be a good, maybe just for a day, to send down a bus to Philly.

RB: Absolutely, the whole campus, with many busses at a minimum. But we need to do something, or otherwise St. Joe’s prep would take all the glory.

RB: By the way, what sort of “token”, or symbol of Malvern could be made?

JS: I think, maybe, out of our beautiful Art Department, something out of ceramics. Our own cross, or miniature of our statue of Augustine and the student, which represents our bringing of that faith to the students. Something like that would be in memory of his visit; not just of downtown Philadelphia, but the whole faith in the area.

In my opinion, it’s pretty exciting to already see some hype for the Pope’s visit. Like Mr. Boyce said, I hope that the Malvern Prep faculty will give us students a chance to see this. This will be quite a historical visit, and I’m sure that we, at Malvern, shouldn’t ignore an opportunity like this one.