Detroit — If all goes according to plan, when Pope Francis receives a package of letters from students at Detroit Cristo Rey High School and other local Catholic schools this month inviting him to visit Detroit next year, the letters from Richard Straksys, Ali Alwan, Christopher Jimenez and Eduardo Garduno will be the first he sees.

Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, English-language assistant to the Vatican’s press office and president of Windsor’s Assumption University, visited Cristo Rey on Dec. 2 to pick up the handwritten letters during a school-wide assembly, and promised the students he’d see to it that they were delivered to the pope.

Specifically, Fr. Rosica plans to make the delivery when he visits Rome this month to take part in a Dec. 16 news conference to announce the final report of a five-year Vatican inquiry into U.S. communities of women religious, also known as an apostolic visitation.

When he does so, it will be the culmination of an effort spearheaded largely by a small group of Cristo Rey High School students, who along with their peers from other local Catholic grade and high schools have worked for months to coordinate the letter-writing campaign.

During the assembly, Straksys, Alwan, Jimenez and Garduno were honored by their classmates for their efforts, along with two other students, Kourtney Ross and Juanita Zuniga, who could not attend because of work-study obligations.

“It takes a lot of initiative to stick with something that long, especially when it seems like nothing’s happening,” said Cristo Rey’s principal, Susan Rowe, of the students’ efforts. “But it did. We may or may not see the pope here in Detroit, but the hope is alive, and we’re still going to ask.”

Fr. Rosica, who addressed the assembly along with Detroit Deputy Mayor Ike McKinnon and Msgr. Robert McClory, moderator of the curia for the Archdiocese of Detroit, told the students that while Pope Francis receives thousands of letters, “I guarantee you, he reads this stuff.”

“He doesn’t just farm it out to people,” Fr. Rosica said. “I saw the piles in the room where he lives; he reads them and goes through them.”

Fr. Rosica, who also is CEO of Canada’s Salt and Light Television Network, said people often ask him whether the Pope Francis they see on TV and read about is “the real thing.”

“And I say, ‘Folks, with Pope Francis, what you see is what you get,’” he said. “Everything that’s extraordinary about Pope Francis is what’s ordinary.”

Msgr. McClory thanked the students for their hard work and said Archbishop Allen Vigneron had mailed his own letter to the pope a week earlier, which included the archbishop’s personal invitation and a “head’s up” that Fr. Rosica would be arriving with the students’ letters.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has also issued a personal invitation for Pope Francis to visit Detroit when he makes his scheduled U.S. visit in September 2015. While the pope has confirmed he will visit Philadelphia for the Sept. 22-27 World Meeting of Families, it’s widely expected he will add other U.S. stops as well, including potentially Washington, D.C., and New York, as well as possibly a stop along the southern U.S. border.

After the assembly, Fr. Rosica met with the four Cristo Rey students privately for several minutes, showing them pictures of Pope Francis’ election and asking their impressions of the Holy Father.

“When I see his face, I see someone who’s beautiful, holy,” said Alwan, a junior. “There’s peace in his mind, and he wants to give peace to the whole world. He’s someone you can love.”

Straksys said what initially drew him was Pope Francis’ message and attention to young people.

“It gives a very clear image of how connected he is with the youth and what kind of person he is,” the junior said. “Very nice, loving and caring. He cares more about the people than about himself.”

Garduno said Pope Francis reminded him a lot of Jesus for the way he “meets with people of various ages, genders, just like Jesus would do.”

Garduno told Fr. Rosica the pope was “like Jesus in 2014,” a characterization the priest said he liked.

“Write another letter and send it to me, and include that phrase in it,” Fr. Rosica instructed the four students. “When I give him the box, I’m going to put those four letters on top, and say ‘Check out these letters first.’”