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If there are two things that keep our school going, it is our faith and our hotdogs.... We thank our student council for helping us celebrate in that view of the past, the present and the future. Another view of the Catholic school past, present and future I put in today’s bulletin. It might be of interest to you. It really comes down to this...

If you look over Catholic Schools in groups of maybe fifty years, I would describe the first fifty years as “We are against them and they are against us.” It was the Catholic School as a safe place, but really a safe ghetto. There are vestiges of that today, for example, the Bible is not read in public schools and prayer is not allowed in public schools. That was promoted by Catholic schools and the Catholic Church. That was our position. If our children are going to your school, don’t be reading your Bible and praying with them. We do that in our school, and we still support that today. Very interesting. But what it led to was the survival of our identity, through Catholic Schools, our faith and our tradition. That lasted from about the 1880’s to about the 1930’s.

The next stage in our Catholic Schools was really a stage that I would call the Stage of Success. Those are the days of the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and early 60’s. We might remember it as a day when we had a cheap labor force and tuition was next to nothing, that we were clearly different, from the sister’s habits to our own uniforms, to the fact that it was a shared truth throughout our country that no Catholic could ever become President in this country. We were very different, but at the same time we were just as good, if not better than, other American citizens. And there were many signs of that. It is interesting, if you look in the 40’s, at the Oscars, which are coming up again soon. Nine to sixteen of them were about Catholics and Catholic people, “Going My Way,” “Bells of St. Mary’s,” “Keys of the Kingdom,” “Song of Bernadette,” one after the other. We were very prominent in our culture. And what we had was high quality of our education, good citizenship, and the knowledge that, even though we had separation of church and state, it did not mean separation of Catholic citizens from their land.

And finally, in 1960, we get a Catholic president, although, remember that one of the key steps in his being elected was giving a press conference to all the Baptist ministers of Texas and assuring them that he would never, at any time, exercise his faith in office the way President Carter did or the way President Bush does today or the way Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell call for. He made the promise that we Catholics would never do that.

Then we moved to the present stage of Catholic Schools, and I would say we are very much a part of America but with a difference. One of the differences is that most of our staff and faculty are lay people. The tuition is a little bit higher. How many have noticed that?...... a show of hands...... Oh, my goodness! Raise the tuition. Most of them haven’t noticed! We are very much a part of the American culture, but with something different to say. From our gospel, we want to be a people who make a difference. Today’s gospel is a good sign of that. Our young people have done it in outreach to other communities in the Bay Area and outside of our country, to announce good news to the poor and the values of a loving God being at hand. Let us give thanks to the Lord Who is so good! Amen.

And let us give thanks for our principal, our administration, our faculty and staff. Would all our staff and faculty of our school please stand. ......Applause!