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Volume 53, Issue 103 | monday, march 25, 2019 | ndsmcobserver.com
Students celebrate Muslim community Notre Dame’s Muslim Student Association hosts events for Islam Awareness Week By AARON BENAVIDES News Writer
Notre Dame’s Muslim Student Association (MSA) kicked off their annual Islam Awareness Week for 2019 last Saturday. The week is designed to share aspects of the Islamic faith with students across campus, sophomore and MSA president Muhammad Abubakar Mian said. “The main purpose of Islam Awareness Week is really just exposure,” Mian said. “It’s providing an opportunity for the non-Muslim community here on campus to come together with the Muslim community, to start a dialogue or get interacting with one another.”
On Saturday, MSA hosted an Islamophobia Training session, a new addition to the annual Awareness Week. The event focused on bringing awareness to the issue of Islamophobia and promoting and understanding allyship. One of the biggest events of the week is a hijab distribution, which will take place Monday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Fieldhouse Mall. This event focuses on educating people about the meaning, purpose and history of the hijab. “With the hijab distribution, people can just come by — and obviously there’ll be a couple of see ISLAM PAGE 3
Gateway Program provides path to Notre Dame
Photo Courtesy of Muhammad Abubakar Mian
Members of the Muslim Student Association pass out hijabs during 2016’s Islam Awareness Week outside DeBartolo Hall as a way of informing students on Muslim practices and creating interreligious dialogue.
SMC Autism Studies Program receives $500,000 By EMMA AULT News Writer
The Masters of Autism Studies Program at Saint Mary’s received a $500,000 endowment last week from the Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin Foundation, located in New York City. Michael Waddell, director of the Autism Studies Program, said the Ruffin
Photo Courtesy of Frankie Boley
Gateway students pose for a photo outside Holy Cross College in 2016. Those with qualifying academics are admitted to Notre Dame. By NICOLE WHITE News Writer
Each year, a select number of high school seniors who apply to Notre Dame are neither accepted, rejected nor added to the University’s wait list. Instead, they are offered the opportunity to participate in the Gateway Program. Former Gateway student, junior Harrison Kranz said he had never heard of the program until he was
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Foundation first became interested in the College’s program after the success of its Pivotal Response treatment workshop in March 2018. “We had 600 people registered for that workshop, which was our first one, and it made quite a splash,” he said. “From what I gather, that is what caught the attention of the people at the Ruffin Foundation.”
Waddell said he also thinks the program will gain attention due to the fact that the students will receive additional education through future workshops. “When students arrive, they’ll participate in those workshops, so in addition to their academic coursework, they’ll be trained in all the see AUTISM PAGE 3
Church leaders discuss Catholic social teaching in the ’50s, he said. In 1962, however, a coup d’etat ushered in an era of martial law that would last nearly half a century. During this time, non-Buddhist minority groups, including the Catholic Church, endured intense persecution from the state. “In 1962, we lost everything, and [the] myopic socialist regime expelled the missionaries,” he said. “All our resources were challenged.”
see GATEWAY PAGE 4
Catholic leaders Cardinal Charles Maung Bo and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez urged the Church for a greater devotion to the poor in the Center for Social Concerns’ 2019 Catholic Social Tradition conference, titled “Engaging Social Tradition: Option for the Poor.” The seminar, which took place from Thursday to
Saturday, hosted a number of presentations, lectures and panels on the topic of the preferential option for the poor — a modern principle of Catholic theology based on advocacy for the marginalized. In a lecture Friday evening in McKenna Hall, Bo, the first-ever cardinal of Myanmar, called for the Church to remember the needs of the poor in Myanmar and similar impoverished countries. Catholicism was first brought to the country by Jesuit missionaries
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offered a place in it. “I was in the fourth class since its inception, but now I tell others that I used to be a Gateway and the response is usually, ‘Oh yeah, I know so-and-so is a Gateway,’” Kranz said. “It’s cool to see that awareness is spreading.” The Gateway Program was created in 2013 as a collaboration between Holy Cross College and the University of Notre Dame. The
By Mary steurer Assistant Managing Editor
see CHURCH PAGE 4