St Michael High School - Archangelo Yearbook (Jersey City, NJ)

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1? HIHMH

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SH RINE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 10 From the time when Columbus approached these shores in the Santa Maria, the history of our country has been a recital of deeds undertaken in honor of the Mother of God. The Spanish who explored from Florida to California, made their camp settlements read like a litany of titles of the Blessed Virgin. Marquette who explored the northern half of the Mississippi had his own name for it. He called it the river of the Immaculate Conception. Spanish Franciscans and Jesuits in the South and French Jesuits in the North, carried the name of Mary throughout the length and breadth of the land. lt is not surprising therefore, that we should come to regard Mary the Mother of God as peculiarly ours, or that Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, first American bishop, should dedicate our land to the Immaculate Mother of God. ln T846 the Sixth Provincial Council, meeting at Baltimore, humbly petitioned the Pope to give us as our national patroness, the Blessed Virgin conceived without sin. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception had not yet been pronounced, but to the honor of the American hierarchy and people, they believed in it and wanted to tell the whole world of their belief. To complete the crown of Mary Immaculate as patroness of America, there still remained the task of building a national shrine which would be an outward symbol of love and a place of pilgrimage where honor might be paid to her. Today one of the most splendid shrines in the world has been erected, the gift of the people of America. When the magnificent interior has been completed, the shrine will be unique not only in America but in Christendom.

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We are all familiar with the scripture's frequent reference to the sower and the seed and of its general application to our spiritual lives. There is for us however a particular application of the parable. School days are in a special way the days of planting, and our characters are the soil in which the good seed is being planted. Our faculty members, priests, sisters and lay teachers are God's helpers in the task of sowing the seed. This is true not only in religion classes but in all the religious influences which surround us in our school life. ln the parable we read of many unproductive lives, those who rejected grace, those without depth of character and who believed only for a time, and finally those who were choked with the pleasures and cares of this world. We trust that we will not fail like these, but that we shall, like so many of our graduates whose lives have been fruitful, work in a spirit of faith and dedication, that the good seed in us may produce a hundred fold.